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THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

i6mo, $1.25. 

ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

New American Edition. With Introduction pre- 
pared expressly for it by the Author. i6mo, 

$1.25. 

THE OCCULT WORLD. 

New American from the Fourth English Edi- 
tion. With an Introduction written for the 
American Edition by the Author, and Appen- 
dix. i6mo, $1.25. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., 

Boston and New York. 






THE RATIONALE OF 
MESMERISM 




A. P.'SINNETT 



AUTHOR OF ESOTERIC BUDDHISM," THE OCCULT WORLD, 
"KARMA," ETC., ETC. m 








FEB 29 1892. 

BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(C6e Ifttoembe Pre??, tfamfcribor 



rA 



* N 






Copyright, 1892, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., IT. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company. 



CONTENTS 



t?t 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Old and New Theories ... 1 

II. The Mesmeric Force 23 

III. The Real Literature of Mesmerism . 36 

IV. Side-Lights on Mesmeric Phenomena . 85 
V. Curative Mesmerism .... 104 

VI. Anesthetic Effects and Rigidity . . 128 
VII. The Nature of Sensitiveness . . 140 

VIII. Clairvoyance 168 

IX. Mesmeric Practice 214 

Index 229 



THE 

RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 



CHAPTER I. 

OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 

It is necessary at the outset that I should 
explain why I am writing about mesmerism 
and not about hypnotism. Names are, after 
all, but tickets put by conventional agree- 
ment upon things or branches of knowledge, 
and if, in the first instance, a hundred years 
ago, when the matter began to attract notice 
in Europe, the word "hypnotism" had been 
adopted to describe certain abnormal condi- 
tions of the human body and the human 
faculties, we need not, at this stage of the 
proceedings, have quarreled with the ex- 
pression. But, though it has become so 
strangely popular quite recently, the term 
"hypnotism" merely represents, as regards 
its actual origin, a misconception of the facts 



2 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

relating to the abnormal conditions just 
mentioned, coupled with a very unworthy 
disposition to slander the first important ex- 
ponent of all this knowledge in modern 
times and to cover a cowardly retreat from 
denials which had become no longer tenable. 
In so far as the term "hypnotism " is con- 
sciously preferred by some modern investi- 
gators, that preference rests on the idea that 
the earlier belief in the days when nothing 
of the kind was spoken of except "mesmer- 
ism," has been shown by later experience to 
be scientifically erroneous. The early belief 
was that something in the nature of a subtle 
fluid passed from the mesmeric operator to 
the subject; whereas some experimentalists 
of the modern school have ascertained that 
results alleged to have been obtained by 
mesmerism can be brought about where no 
operator takes part in the undertaking. 
Some people by simply working for them- 
selves apparatus of a suitable sort, by gaz- 
ing, for example, at the rapid flashes of a 
revolving mirror, or by merely concentrating 
their attention on a spot of bright light, will 
be enabled to bring on a certain abnormal, 
or shall we say cataleptic, condition of their 
nerves, which will in its turn superinduce 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 3 

anaesthesia, perhaps, or even some imperfect 
psychic phenomena. But the discovery of 
these people does not in the smallest degree 
disprove the other discovery of the earlier 
mesmerists that a subtle fluid really does 
pass when an operator, properly qualified 
himself, is at work, and the fact that this is 
so is proved by many more experimentalists 
than have endeavored to maintain the bare 
hypnotic hypothesis. Further than this, 
many mesmerists of the higher order enter- 
tain no doubt concerning the existence of 
this fluid, for the simple reason that they 
can see it. 

Sight is a faculty which varies in its pen- 
etrative power in a greater degree even than 
telescopes vary. A tolerably simple experi- 
ment to test this may be devised on the fol- 
lowing plan : If a spectrum from a ray of 
sunlight be thrown upon a screen, every one 
who is acquainted with the most elementary 
facts of optics will be aware that beyond the 
colored band of light which is visible, there 
are invisible rays, the presence of which can 
be proved by means of photographic paper, 
and the chemical power of which, indeed, is 
considerably greater than that of the bright 
rays actually seen. It is perhaps not so 



4 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

generally known, however, that the power 
of direct vision extends with some people 
much further in the direction of those so- 
called ultra-violet rays than is the case with 
others. The majority of people, it is true, 
will come to a tolerably close agreement as 
to the distance along the colored band of 
light on the screen which they can see, and 
if asked to mark the place at which the vio- 
let tinge absolutely ceases will mark places 
that are not very widely apart, but here and 
there a small percentage of more peculiarly 
endowed observers will be found to see 
greatly beyond the usual stopping-place. 

Just in the same way other visible pheno- 
mena of nature besides rays of violet light 
melt, so to speak, in others which are not 
ordinarily visible, and the subtle fluid which 
emanates from a mesmeric operator is very 
close to the border-land of the phenomena 
which every one can see, and therefore can 
be discerned by, I should think, many more 
people than will be able to see to any con- 
siderable distance into the ultra-violet spec- 
trum. A well-known writer, Baron von 
Reichenbach, devoted himself especially to 
this branch of mesmeric inquiry. He has 
recorded with patient care, for which a pig- 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 5 

headed generation inhabiting the earth 
about the middle of this century gave him 
no gratitude, a long series of results obtained 
with a great many "sensitives" whom he 
employed, all having to do with their power 
of seeing visible emanations from human 
fingers, as also from physical magnetic ap- ' 
paratus. 

Baron von Reichenbach's experiments, 
properly followed up, would have been found 
to constitute a complete demonstration of 
the theory of mesmerism, advanced by Mes- 
mer himself in the first instance, and unre- 
servedly adopted as entirely in harmony 
with their own extensive observation and 
practice by his immediate followers, de Puy- 
segur and Deleuze. But before the Baron's 
time the whole subject had been discredited 
by reason of the fierce incredulity it encoun- 
tered at the hands of the orthodox scientific 
world at the beginning of the century. In 
the long history of human blundering there 
can hardly be any example more remarka- 
ble than that afforded by the rejection of 
mesmerism at this period. The facts illus- 
trating the reality of mesmerism issued in 
torrents from every centre of mesmeric ac- 
tivity, but the passive opposition of bigotry 



6 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

was not to be overcome. Hundreds of 
people practiced mesmerism, employing it 
solely as a curative agent; its highest psy- 
chic aspects being at that time little under- 
stood even by its warmest partisans, and 
thousands of people benefited by its applica- 
tion. But all the recognized societies and 
corporations of science were arrayed in arms 
against it, and professional persecution was 
the lot of any medical man who identified 
himself with the new discovery. This per- 
secution in the end stamped it out almost 
entirely. Some further details on this point 
will fall most naturally into their place when 
I come to speak of the early literature of 
mesmerism, but for the moment I pass on to 
trace the genesis of the modern view of the 
subject in connection with which we have to 
congratulate ourselves on the broad fact, 
that one of the most important avenues of 
knowledge open to students of the natural 
history of humanity is now again available 
for general use, but in connection with 
which, except for that broad fact, we have, 
as a generation, little to be proud of. 

Modern writers on hypnotism are almost 
all building their conclusions on a negation 
of truth concerning the forces really at work 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 7 

in the production of mesmeric phenomena, 
and are committed for the most part to a 
theory which concentrates their attention al- 
most entirely on what is rather a disease of 
the science they deal with, than the science 
itself. Nor do I think it a satisfactory plan 
for people, who know something more of the 
science in its loftier aspect, to "divide the 
records of the mind," and say "hypnotism 
is one thing and mesmerism is another." 
Of course the experiments practiced at the 
Salpetriere are one thing and the healthy 
applications of animal magnetism are an- 
other ; hypnotic suggestion is one thing, and 
the culture of the higher faculties under true 
mesmerism is another. But people who 
adopt the expression "hypnotism" mean 
thereby, or think they mean, to include in 
its range all that is real and genuine in the 
discoveries of Mesmer, all that was not im- 
posture and charlatanry in the practice of 
his immediate successors. Psychic students, 
therefore, who really understand something 
of the forces set in action, whether intelli- 
gently by the mesmerist or unintelligently 
by the hypnotist, cannot handle the term as 
having a departmental significance. It is, 
as a term employed in connection with this 



8 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

subject, the flag of error, so to speak. We 
ought not to make peace with it at all. 

The general use of the term dates back to 
Mr. Braid of Manchester, a surgeon who is 
called by MM. Binet and Fere "the initiator 
of the scientific study of animal magnetism." 

He was really a person who invented a 
method of thinking which enabled people, 
thus inclined, to handle and talk about some 
of the phenomena of mesmerism, without 
setting themselves in opposition to medical 
orthodoxy, and without giving up the un- 
grateful cry that Mesmer was an impostor. 
For half a century the medical profession 
had committed itself to the denial of patent 
facts and the vilification of all who observed 
and reported them. Mr. Braid, by a bold 
manoeuvre, possessed himself of some, at any 
rate, among the facts, and, by putting a 
forged ticket upon them, justified himself 
before the world for continuing to vilify 
their real discoverers — for continuing to 
swim at ease with the stream of bigotry — 
and so afforded his confreres an opportunity 
of escaping from the inconvenience of being 
at war with notorious experience without in- 
curring the humiliation of confessing that 
they had previously been in the wrong. 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 9 

Braid's theory of hypnotism was set forth 
in the first instance in a little volume from 
his pen, published in 1843, under the title 
"Neurypnology; or the Eationale of Ner- 
vous Sleep, considered in relation to Animal 
Magnetism." This was an expansion of an 
address Mr. Braid delivered at a meeting of 
the British Association held in Manchester 
in 1842. The author avows that he was led 
to his conclusions by certain phenomena he 
witnessed at a seance conducted by M. La- 
fontaine, a mesmerist, but he writes rather 
irritably to maintain the originality of his 
views that seem at once to have been referred, 
on their first enunciation, by his critics to 
previous experimentalists, especially M. 
Bertrand and the Abbe Faria. He is spe- 
cially eager to make out that his processes are 
quite different from anything previously 
known. He says, "I have now entirely sep- 
arated hypnotism from animal magnetism. 
I consider it to be merely a simple, speedy, 
and certain mode of throwing the nervous 
system into a new condition which may be 
rendered eminently available in the cure of 
certain disorders." He attended M. Lafon- 
taine's seance because he considered mes- 
meric phenomena "a system of collusion 



10 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

or delusion, or of excited imagination, sym- 
pathy or imitation. . . . That night I saw 
nothing to diminish but rather to confirm 
my previous prejudices." However, "at the 
next conversazione, six nights afterwards, 
one fact, the inability of a patient to open 
his eyelids, arrested my attention. I con- 
sidered that to be a real phenomenon." 

He watched this case especially and felt 
assured he had discovered a cause. He at 
once set to work with experiments of his 
own to prove "that the inability of the 
patient to open his eyes was caused by para- 
lyzing the levator muscles of the eyelids, 
through their continued action during the 
protracted fixed stare." Operating with 
subjects of his own and constraining them 
to fatigue the muscles in question by a pro- 
longed upward gaze, he soon obtained the 
complete hypnotic trance, together with all 
the now familiar symptoms — rigidity of the 
limbs at the command of the operator, great 
exaltation of the senses, liability to halluci- 
nation, imposed by the operator, and cura- 
tive effects in cases of illness where the hyp- 
notic trance was induced with the curative 
intention. There is something fairly ludi- 
crous and not a little contemptible in the 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 11 

way Mr. Braid calmly passes on to deal 
with these phenomena as the results of his 
method and his discovery, when he sets out 
with the assumption that everything of the 
same kind accomplished by his predecessors 
was imposture, and that he picked out from 
mesmerism the one fact that was true, — that 
people could not open their eyes if the leva- 
tor muscles were paralyzed by previous star- 
ing. One can hardly understand how vanity 
could blind him to the glaring absurdity of 
his own position. If fatigue of the levator 
muscles had anything to do with the matter, 
that cause would not extend to effects rang- 
ing beyond the eyelids. Mr. Braid dropped 
upon the curious facts of phreno-mesmerism, 
which show different propensities in a mes- 
merized subject stimulated to unwonted ac- 
tivity by touching the corresponding organs 
of the brain. Piety, benevolence, cupidity, 
can, by his own showing, be played upon in 
this way with a subject who is "hypno- 
tized," and yet he still keeps in the forefront 
of his treatise on all experiments of this na- 
ture, his original silly guess that the state in 
which they become possible is due to the 
fatigue of certain muscles in the eyelids. 
Mr. Braid in reality must have been a 



12 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

mesmerist of considerable force, without 
knowing enough of the subject he arrogantly 
despised to understand the methods by 
which his results were accomplished ; for he 
evidently obtained an extraordinarily large 
percentage of successes with the people he 
experimented on. But he has received so 
much undue credit of late from modern 
writers on the subject, especially in this 
country, that it is worth while to show, in 
opposition to the indignant claim for origi- 
nality he puts forward, that there was no- 
thing original even in his misapprehensions. 
One of the best — or least objectionable — 
modern books on the subject, Dr. Moll's 
"Hypnotism" (translated from the Ger- 
man), skims the history of mesmerism at 
the outset, and says: "The whole doctrine 
received a great impetus through the Abbe 
Faria. ... In 1814-15 he showed by ex- 
periments, whose results he published, that 
no unknown force was necessary for the pro- 
duction of the phenomena; the cause of the 
sleep, he said, was in the person who was to 
be sent to sleep; all was subjective." This 
is the main principle of hypnotism and of 
suggestion of which Faria, even then, made 
use in inducing sleep. Two other investiga- 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 13 

tors in France must be mentioned, Bertrand 
and Noizet, who paved the way for the doc- 
trine of suggestion in spite of much inclina- 
tion to animal magnetism. 

Thus Mr. Braid is glorified in modern ar- 
ticles and books on hypnotism, as the man 
who extracted the real truth of the subject 
from the confusion left by foolish enthusi- 
asts or impostors in the beginning, and put 
us all on a scientific foundation, in spite of 
the fact that his view is not only a gigantic 
blunder, absurdly at variance with the facts, 
even as reported by himself — but even as a 
blunder, no better than a plagiary. 

The Manchester surgeon's reasoning would 
have been blown to atoms by contemporary 
critics if it had been opposed to instead of 
chiming in with conventional prejudice. 
But fashion soon becomes an ample cloak 
for bad logic, and, one after another, mod- 
ern writers, if drawn to the subject of 
mesmeric phenomena at all, date their chro- 
nology from the year 1 of the Braidian era. 
Even the treatise on "Hypnotism," by Al- 
bert Moll, of Berlin, though in some re- 
spects *the best of the recent volumes of the 
Braidian school, is infected with its funda- 
mental principle. I hope to show shortly 



14 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

that the real literature of mesmerism lies in 
the background, behind the shower of occa- 
sional essays brought forth by the vogue of 
Dr. Charcot's experiments, but it maybe as 
well, in the first instance, to complete the 
account I have just given of Braid's own 
work, by noticing some of those which follow 
in his footsteps. 

Dr. Moll's book is not without merit as an 
epitome of the subject from the limited mod- 
ern standpoint. It contains a fairly reason- 
able and impartial though hasty survey of 
the rise and progress of mesmerism from the 
time of Mesmer onward to the present day, 
also an account of the different methods em- 
ployed by different schools of mesmerists in 
inducing the various mesmeric phenomena. 
The writer chiefly errs in concentrating his 
attention too much on recent results, and in 
dealing with the phenomena of hypnotic sug- 
gestion as though they constituted an en- 
tirely new departure in human knowledge. 
He justly rebukes some modern scientists 
who treat hypnotic experiments with con- 
tempt, but says "so long as science does not 
examine everything practically and without 
prejudice, the great delusions of which ani- 
mal magnetism, etc. , make use will continue 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 15 

to exist," — thus himself treating with con- 
tempt the branches of his own subject with 
which he happens to be unacquainted. In 
conclusion, he says : "In spite of the progress 
which the exact sciences have made, we must 
not for a moment forget that the inner con- 
nection between the body and the mental 
processes is utterly unknown to us. Under 
these circumstances we should not refuse to 
examine the apparently inexplicable . ' ' Cer- 
tainly the representatives of modern physical 
science are utterly without knowledge con- 
cerning the relations of mind and body, but 
that is not true of all mankind, as occult 
students are aware, and the annals of the 
higher mesmerism go far to point out hope- 
ful paths of investigation in that direction. 
But the value even of mesmerism as an aid 
to such researches may be reduced to zero, 
if we calmly ignore all that the greatest in- 
vestigators of the past have accomplished, 
and devote ourselves exclusively to the super- 
ficial phenomena rediscovered in the last few 
years by the hypnotists whose chosen desig- 
nation marks them out as people who have 
deliberately elected to ignore the greatest 
work done by their predecessors. 

Two French writers, MM. Alfred Binet 



16 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

and Charles Fere, the latter assistant phy- 
sician at the Salpetriere in Paris, have pub- 
lished in London a book in English which is 
called ''Animal Magnetism," perhaps sim- 
ply to avoid repeating the title " Hypnotism, " 
already so frequently used ; but it might just 
as well have been called by the expression 
so popular for the moment. It is introduced 
to the reader as written in the environment 
of the Salpetriere ; it is based^ on the notion 
that there is but one hypnotism, and that 
Charcot is its prophet. 

The keynote of the volume, as an inter- 
pretation of the phenomena it deals with, 
may be found in the following sentences 
from the beginning of an early chapter: 
"As far as its mode of production is con- 
cerned, hypnotic sleep does not essentially 
differ from natural sleep, of which it is in 
fact only a modification, and all the causes 
which produce fatigue are capable of produ- 
cing hypnosis in those who are subject to it. 
. . . Sensorial excitements produce hyp- 
nosis in two ways, — when they are strong 
and abrupt, or when they are faint and con- 
tinued for a prolonged period." 

It is difficult to criticise such a theory as 
this in moderate terms. It is difficult to get 



OLD ASD NEW THEORIES. 17 

behind the mind of a man who can think 
that a condition in which people can suffer 
a leg to be cut off without knowing it is 
something akin to natural sleep and to be 
properly described as only a modification of 
it. Certainly in one sense "death and his 
brother sleep " are akin, but rather in poetic 
fancy than in the pages of sober science. If 
one thing is said to be a modification of an- 
other, the meaning surely is that it does not 
differ oreatlv from it in essential character. 
In the mesmeric trance not only do we meet 
with astounding effects of anaesthesia. — 
when a pinch of the arm would be enough to 
wake anybody from "natural sleep."' — but 
also an entirely new condition of the intel- 
lectual faculties utterly cut off by oblivion 
before the subject comes out of the trance, 
from the waking consciousness. "Who has 
known the natural sleep in which the sleeper 
is able to converse freely on recondite sub- 
jects quite unfamiliar to him in his waking 
state? and yet it is a common experience of 
mesmerism that this is possible in the mag- 
netic trance. If MM. Binet and Fere had 
said, "In the narrow and limited phase of 
mesmeric conditions, with which we are 
alone concerned, there is some analogy be- 



18 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

tween what we call hypnosis and ordinary 
sleep," the statement would hardly be accu- 
rate ; but when put forward on the basis of a 
general assumption that the so-called hyp- 
nosis embraces all that is true and real in 
mesmerism, it is nothing less than absurd. 

In fact, the whole theory of the Charcot 
school depends upon a studious disregard of 
all the facts of experience that do not square 
with it. For instance, in the book before us 
we read of "manoeuvres which formerly led 
to the belief that it is possible to magnetize 
from a distance," and then this belief is dis- 
posed of by the supposition that in such cases 
the subject had been told to expect the effect 
from a distance at a certain time, and there- 
fore the results have only been due to "sug- 
gestion in the waking state." In reality all 
the records of mesmerism, both early and 
recent, teem with illustrations of the way in 
which magnetic influence from a distance 
has been successfully exerted upon persons 
quite unprepared to expect it. From de 
Puysegur's time down to some of the recent 
experiments of the Society for Psychical Re- 
search, the fact has been substantiated over 
and over again, but it does not fit in with the 
favorite Braid-Charcot hypothesis, so tant 
pis pour lesfaits as usual. 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 19 

The more attention we pay to modern 
writers on hypnotism, the more those of us 
who are also familiar with the earlier writers 
will be struck by the fact that above all their 
other characteristics the modern hypnotists 
from Braid downwards are not those who 
have put the investigation of mesmeric phe- 
nomena on a scientific basis. They have 
done just the reverse; they have degraded 
an inquiry which was opened just a hundred 
years ago in a truly scientific spirit, into an 
attempt to bolster up an unintelligent preju- 
dice. For the truly scientific spirit leads 
people to study all the facts of experience in 
the particular department of nature con- 
cerned, and to refrain from premature the- 
orizing in directions from which some of these 
facts warn them off. There was no prema- 
ture theorizing in the case of Mesmer and his 
followers when they adopted the hypothesis 
of a mesmeric or magnetic fluid. All the 
facts known to them up to that time squared 
with that hypothesis, and if their successors 
had been loyal to truth and had gone on test- 
ing the early hypothesis by later experience 
they would have found it supported by every- 
thing that has been discovered since, and in 
no way refuted by the discovery that some of 



20 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

the phenomena produced by the agency of 
the magnetic fluid were also susceptible of 
being induced — more or less imperfectly — 
in other ways as well. But latter-day inves- 
tigators have not been loyal to truth. They 
have chosen for consideration only those 
facts and experiences which suited them and 
have calmly ignored the rest. Incidentally, 
it is true, they have done a public service ; 
they have set afloat a general belief that 
mesmerism after all is a reality, and but for 
them perhaps it would only at this day have 
been a reality for isolated students of occult 
science. But the limitations to which their 
own theories and methods condemn their 
thinking are deplorable, and stand at this 
moment terribly in the way of any real pro- 
gress in the cultivation of the public mind 
along the channels of research which mes- 
merism, correctly appreciated, opens out. 

The principle of study, which it is my 
foremost desire to impress on those who will 
listen to me, is this: Let all who wish to 
read about mesmerism go back to the foun- 
tain-head of the subject and explore the vol- 
uminous writings of the early French school, 
of which I propose to speak more fully in 
the next few pages. In that literature the 



OLD AND NEW THEORIES. 21 

real foundations of our knowledge of mes- 
merism were laid. There we shall find, it is 
true, some traces of a most pardonable, if 
not praiseworthy, excitement and enthusiasm 
in reference to the wonderful beneficence of 
the new revelation which mesmeric discover- 
ies seemed to embody. There we shall read 
of some procedure in which we shall fail to 
discern the true working of Mesmer's own 
ideas ; but at the time a prodigious excite- 
ment was operative with large numbers of 
people deeply stirred by wonder and admi- 
ration, and many cures were worked through 
the influence of an overwhelming faith in 
association with an external ceremonial that 
probably had little, if any, objective effect. 
Similar results have been observed within 
recent years at Lourdes, and only the other 
day at Treves, in connection with the exhi- 
bition of the "Holy Coat." But persons 
who justly conceive that touching a Holy 
Coat, of which even the holiness is apocry- 
phal, would not do them any good, make a 
mistake unworthy of the superior sense they 
take credit for if they fail to realize th^t full 
belief in a Holy Coat or a holy anything is a 
real force within the organisms of the per- 
sons inspired by it. Mesmer's baquets and 



22 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

de Puysegur's magnetized trees may not have 
worked in the same way as the "passes" 
and magnetic currents with which those 
early experimentalists sought to coordinate 
them. But they worked, and therefore the 
writers in question honestly recorded the 
facts concerning them, not yet having 
learned from Mr. Braid and the hypnotizers 
that the way to put their inquiry on a scien- 
tific basis was to pick and choose among 
the experiences they acquired, so as only 
to father those which were calculated to 
please a self-sufficient public opinion around 
them. 

To put aside the writings and experiments 
that relate to the present distorted revival of 
mesmerism, under a misleading pseudonym, 
and to turn back to the pages of de Puyse- 
gur and Deleuze, Bicard, Gauthier, Teste, 
and du Potet, is like passing from an evil 
and stifling to a pure moral atmosphere. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE MESMERIC FORCE. 

Before tracing our way back to the be- 
ginnings of modern mesmerism in the very- 
earliest years of the century, it may be well 
to pause for a while about half-way back at 
the stage attained by Baron von Reichen- 
bach. His researches may fairly be taken 
as the groundwork of a correct theory of 
mesmerism. The book in which they are all 
brought out, generally known to students of 
this sort of literature as "Reichenbach's Re- 
searches," bears in reality a somewhat pon- 
derous title. It is called on the title page 
of the English translation by Dr. Ashburner 
" Physico-Physiological Researches on the 
Dynamics of Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, 
Light, Crystallization, and Chemism in 
their relations to Vital Force, by Baron 
Charles von Reichenbach. " The author had 
lighted on the discovery that sensitives in ill- 
ness could see luminous emanations or flames 
issuing from the poles of magnets. At that 



24 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

time, as we shall see later on, the faculties 
which constitute a person what we now call 
a sensitive, were supposed to manifest them- 
selves during illness only, and they were 
sought for by inquirers among persons suf- 
fering from some form of sickness. With 
the painstaking care of a true man of sci- 
ence, Baron von Reichenbach repeated his 
experiments with magnets with a great num- 
ber of subjects, taking care of course to test 
the reality of their power to see what they 
said they saw, by making them find out his 
magnets in dark rooms, without having been 
told where they had been placed, and in 
other ways. Then he found that the lumi- 
nous brushes or flames were to be seen 
emanating from crystals as well as from mag- 
nets. The experiments which brought out 
these facts were elaborate and protracted, 
but soon acquired a new development al- 
most by accident. 

Baron von Reiehenbach discovered that 
luminous appearances, similar to those 
emanating from magnets and crystals, pro- 
ceeded from the human hand in a great 
many cases, and he dropped upon this fact 
quite by chance in the first instance, without 
having set out on this inquiry with any pre- 



THE MESMERIC FORCE. 25 

conceived theory. He was experimenting 
with one of his sensitives with a magnet in 
the dark, and she was playing with the lu- 
minous flame which she could perceive com- 
ing out of the ends, when he in the darkness 
put his hand between her and the magnet. 
She immediately began to play in the same 
way with emanations from the hand, and 
spoke to the bystanders of five little flames 
which leaped up and down in the air. She 
did not see the hand itself, and at first sup- 
posed the five little flames to be some inde- 
pendent phenomenon. Other persons pres- 
ent then raised their hands before her, and 
from various fingers she saw a similar light 
emitted more or less energetically. This 
sensitive, Miss Keichel, appears to have 
been the first in connection with whom Baron 
von Reichenbach broke down an erroneous 
belief which had hitherto prevailed with all 
the earlier mesmerists. As we shall see 
when coming to review the early literature, 
almost all the experimentalists, closely fol- 
lowing on Mesmer, became possessed of the 
idea that the clairvoyance they discovered in 
their patients, and which almost always had 
reference to the patients' illnesses, was ne- 
cessarily extinguished on the recovery of 



26 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

health ; and they thus drifted into a way of 
supposing that the power was in some way 
morbid in its character, that it related 
exclusively to pathological conditions, and 
ceased to be effective when these were 
no longer present. In reference to Miss 
Reichel, Baron von Reichenbach announces 
as a wonderful fact that even after she got 
well she continued to see the magnetic flames, 
the crystal light, and the flames on the hand 
whenever it was dark enough. On inquiry 
it appeared that she had possessed this fac- 
ulty even from childhood, and had two sis- 
ters" who, like herself, saw these luminous 
appearances when other persons could see 
nothing. 

Further experiments with other sensitives 
soon enabled the Baron to generalize as a 
principle, and to declare, that fiery brushes 
of light issue from the points of the fingers 
of healthy men in the same manner as from 
the poles of crystals. Readers who may 
take up the Baron's book now, especially 
with the object of getting information about 
the vital mesmeric fluid, will be tantalized to 
find how much more of his attention he de- 
voted to mechanical sources of the luminous 
effect than to those having direct reference 



THE MESMERIC FORCE. 27 

to mesmeric energy. But the truth, is that 
this characteristic of his research gives it 
peculiar importance at the present day to 
students of mesmerism as a science, because 
it links the vital energy of the human frame 
with other great forces in nature, and brings 
our thinking into line with those great phi- 
losophical speculations which always seek for 
unity in nature. A very disjointed and il- 
logical conception of the cosmos is that 
which regards anything in man as altogether 
peculiar to himself as a manifestation of na- 
ture. Just as his physique is related in va- 
rious ways to the matter around us out of 
which it is built up by the subtle chemistry 
of living organisms, and just as philosophical 
convictions must force us to the conclusion 
that the highest spiritual element in the hu- 
man soul has in some way a common origin 
with the Universal Spirit from whose energy 
the whole of what is called creation must 
have proceeded, so also it is only reasonable 
to suppose that these intermediate forces with 
which we are now dealing, the vital forces 
which are something intermediate in their 
character between matter and spirit, must 
themselves be related to some corresponding 
agent of wide diffusion through the universe. 



28 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

Mesmer guessed at this with the inspiration 
of genius, and ridiculed as he was by the 
learned folly of his time, the latest coordi- 
nation of all our knowledge having reference 
to occult forces is steadily bringing us back 
to the position he took up. Let us profit, 
therefore, by von Reichenbaeh's researches 
even where they do not directly refer to man- 
ifestations of vital energy proceeding from 
living organisms. Especially let us profit 
by some very interesting and suggestive ex- 
periments he tried with sunlight as a source 
of energy discernible in the case of magnets. 
He wished to ascertain whether sunlight fall- 
ing on one end of a copper wire would su- 
perinduce any conditions in the other end 
when this should be examined in a dark room 
by one of his sensitives. The copper wire 
by itself presented no appearance that could 
be remarked, but when the other end was 
put out into the sunshine a crystallic lumi- 
nosity became perceptible in a weak degree 
as emanating from the other end in the dark 
room. The next experiment had to do with 
a superior arrangement of this apparatus. 
The wire was attached at one end to a plate 
of copper, and this plate of copper was ex- 
posed to the sunlight. Under these condi- 



THE MESMERIC FORCE. 29 

tions a powerful manifestation of the lu- 
minous energy, which Baron von Reichen- 
bach eventually calls the "odic force," was 
manifested. The importance of this discov- 
ery — which von Reichenbach checks in a 
great many ways, and elaborates with a great 
variety of substances besides copper — re- 
sides in the obvious reflection that the sun's 
light is the great source of vital energy 
which evokes organic conditions of matter 
from the inorganic world. The whole veg- 
etable creation is the first storehouse of vital 
energy, whatever it may be, and this it 
clearly derives directly from the sun's rays. 
That the animal kingdom derives its vital 
forces from the translation of vegetable or- 
ganisms into those adapted to its own re- 
quirements is equally obvious, and the sun's 
light must thus be regarded as indirectly the 
source of animal life. How far it might 
influence, refresh, or stimulate that life by 
direct application is unknown to us, only 
because modern science has been so densely 
incapable of pursuing lines of thought which 
do not hinge directly on to any of its own 
material achievements. 

Among Baron von Reichenbach' s experi- 
ments, one long series which I must not stop 



30 THE MATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

to recapitulate in detail, has reference to the 
polar character of the odic force; distinct 
analogies between the polar character of 
ordinary magnetism and that of the vital 
energy being elaborately traced. 

Von Reichenbach's first volume, though 
published in the English translation in 1850, 
relates to a series of experiments which were 
apparently concluded about the year 1848. 
Attacks of all kinds were of course leveled 
against him, and his results treated as incon- 
clusive. Recognizing himself that they 
rested on a foundation which was narrow, 
considering the importance of the principles 
to be established, being the result of experi- 
ments with five different sensitives, he set 
to work in the two following years to expand 
them enormously. When his second volume 
was brought out he was enabled to supply a 
list of sixty sensitive persons, men and w t o- 
men, mothers and maidens, children and 
aged persons, high, low, rich, and poor, 
with whom he had repeated the experiences 
of his first investigation; and now he had 
come satisfactorily to the principle that ill- 
ness had nothing to do with the matter as 
regards the power of perceiving the odic 
fluid. Perfectly healthy and strong persons 



THE MESMERIC FORCE. 31 

are included in considerable numbers in his 
new list. It is little less than amazing that 
such an enormous body of results as in these 
two volumes von Reichenbach brought to- 
gether should have remained for half a cen- 
tury almost unnoticed by those who arrogate 
to themselves the title of natural philoso- 
phers, and that it should still be merely a 
record of interest for an isolated few whose 
intuitions and foresight enable them to dis- 
cern in the forces appertaining to other than 
the physical planes of nature, the possibili- 
ties of an advancement for human know- 
ledge that will far eclipse, some time in the 
future, the achievements of which the nine- 
teenth century has been so proud. 

Even before Eeichenbach's time some of 
the early experimentalists of Mesmer's own 
epoch had come into contact with the fact 
that luminous emanations could be seen in 
connection with hands employed to project 
the mesmeric fluid, and even Bertrand, of 
whom, amongst others, I shall have to speak 
shortly, acknowledges that his sensitives as- 
sure him that they see a fluid emanating 
from his own fingers, although he himself is 
not disposed to believe them, and constructs 
an elaborate theory of his own almost as 



32 THE BATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

illogical as some of those presented to us by 
the most modern writers, to account for the 
already enormous accumulation of mesmeric 
experience. 

For the moment, of course, the mesmeric 
fluid theory is altogether out of fashion, and 
the most recent inquirers who have set to 
work within the last few years to rediscover 
the facts already included in books written 
from fifty to eighty years ago, have been con- 
spicuous illustrations of one very common 
human frailty in reference to all advances 
of knowledge. When, for the first time, 
their attention has been turned to a subject 
neglected up till then, they have acted as 
though their own conversion to an apprecia- 
tion of the facts constituted a sort of new 
departure for those facts. There is some- 
thing positively ludicrous to readers familiar 
with the earlier books in the great library of 
mesmeric literature, in the way the least in- 
telligent of modern students invariably treat 
the whole subject, if they handle it at all, as 
something which they, for the first time, at 
last have ascertained to be really worth in- 
quiry, and in reference to which it is now 
important that mankind should begin, in 
company with them, to observe facts and lay 



THE MESMERIC FORCE. 33 

a foundation for reasoning. We have been 
confronted in the last few years with a del- 
uge of hypnotic literature, but most of the 
books written to amplify the hypnotic hypo- 
thesis could hardly, one would think, have 
been written if the authors had had the good 
sense to acquaint themselves with all that 
had been previously done in the line of their 
own investigations. It seems, as I have 
said already, rather as though the object of 
the manoeuvre was to escape from an unten- 
able position, than to exhibit any new truth, 
when the first exponents of the hypnotic 
theory adopted the principle they represent. 

To identify those who were really the first 
exponents of this principle might be difficult 
now. Bertrand at all events anticipated 
Braid by half a lifetime, though Braid was so 
satisfied of his own originality that he ridi- 
cules, as we have seen, with the utmost pos- 
sible indignation, some contemporary critics 
who endeavored to introduce him to his 
predecessors in error. JPereant qui ante nos 
nostra dixerint. 

Before leaving this branch of the subject 
let me add that Reichenbach's experiments, 
as will have been seen, lent a better justifi- 
cation than is generally supposed to exist 



34 THE BATIONALE OF MESMEBISM. 

for the habit into which early mesmeric 
writers fell of calling the mesmeric fluid 
"magnetism." This term has rather exas- 
perated modern scientific thinkers, who com- 
plain, not without apparent reason, that no- 
thing in the behavior or phenomena of what 
is called animal magnetism bears any more 
relation to the force known as magnetism in 
the laboratories, than to gravitation or chem- 
ical affinity or any other force of nature we 
like to name. But first of all the whole lit- 
erature of this subject is so saturated with 
the expression "magnetism " as applied to all 
the phenomena with which mesmerists deal, 
that it would be hardly possible at the pres- 
ent day to comb it free of that expression; 
and, secondly, we have, at all events, no 
better term that can be employed to take its 
place. Further than this, so very close a 
correspondence is observed by people who 
can see beyond the ordinary boundary of 
visual perception, between the emanations 
of physical magnets both of the permanent 
and electrically excited orders, and, on the 
other hand, the emanations proceeding from 
the fingers and head of a mesmerist, — and 
obviously concerned in some way with the 
so-called magnetic trance of his subject, — 



THE MESMERIC FORCE. 35 

that in the present state of our knowledge I 
think it would be a great mistake to quarrel 
too hastily with the term "animal magnet- 
ism." Personally, I believe that to be a 
designation which much more accurately 
defines the great majority of mesmeric phe- 
nomena than any other we could employ. 
It certainly covers a hundred such pheno- 
mena for every one which fits in with the 
hypnotic hypothesis, and is therefore the 
best abstract term to employ next after the 
still more convenient, because non-connota- 
tive, expression derived from the name of 
the unfortunate and much abused Mesmer. 



CHAPTER HI. 

THE REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 

Mesmer himself — Frederick Anthony 
Mesmer — according to Picard, was born at 
Weiler on the Rhine, in the year 1734. He 
studied medicine in his youth and settled as 
a doctor in Vienna, where he ultimately mar- 
ried advantageously. In 1766 he wrote a 
dissertation on "The Influences of the Plan- 
ets on the Human Body," which drew upon 
him much ridicule and professional opposi- 
tion. The attempt to account for this in- 
fluence led him to make the experiments 
which introduced him to the facts with which 
his name has been since indissolubly associ- 
ated. At first he worked entirely with mag- 
nets, obtained some cures by this means, and 
wrote "A Letter to a Foreign Physician on 
the Magnetic Remedy." But he was much 
persecuted for his audacity. For the fur- 
ther development of his inquiries he estab- 
lished a private hospital in his own house for 
the relief of destitute invalids. He soon 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 37 

came to the conclusion that the magnetic 
rods with which his first experiments were 
made, only served as conductors for a fluid 
emanating from his own person. To this he 
at once gave the name Animal Magnetism, 
and theorized boldly concerning its diffusion 
through nature. But he was accused of de- 
ceiving his public, and of having magnetic 
rods concealed about his person — an accu- 
sation which is very amusing, in view of the 
fact that, when he really used magnetic 
rods, he was ridiculed for expecting to ob- 
tain curative results by such means. His 
reputation was assailed and his fortune im- 
paired. He sought some more favorable 
theatre for the development of his experi- 
ments, and moved from Vienna to Paris in 
1777. Two years later he published a short 
treatise, entitled "Memoire sur la decou- 
verte du Magnetisme Animal." The the- 
ory put forward rested on Mesmer's convic- 
tion that "there exists a reciprocal influence 
between the heavenly bodies, the earth, and 
animated beings." The medium of this in- 
fluence he conceived to be "a very subtle 
fluid pervading the whole universe, which 
from its nature is capable of receiving, prop- 
agating, and communicating every impulse 



38 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

of motion. The reciprocal action is subject 
to certain mechanical laws which have not 
yet been discovered. . . . The animal body 
experiences the alternative effects of this 
agent, which, by insinuating itself into the 
substance of the nerves, affects them imme- 
diately." Mesmer's suggestions to this ef- 
fect were treated by the men of science in 
Paris at the time with contempt. One, in- 
deed, of the members of the medical faculty 
of Paris, Dr. D'Eslon, became a warm par- 
tisan of Mesmer's views. But, instead of 
inquiring into them, the Faculty suspended 
Dr. D'Eslon for a year, and ordered that, 
at the expiration of this time, his name 
should be erased from the list of the society, 
unless he recanted his declaration of belief. 
The public meanwhile became interested to 
some extent in the new ideas, as the fame 
of various magnetic cures had been spread 
about. Various persons testified to the fact 
that Mesmer had cured them, but the pub- 
lic journals ridiculed him, and the medical 
profession reviled him. In 1781 he pub- 
lished a work entitled "Precis Historique 
des Faits relatif au Magnetisme Animal." 
The opposition he encountered only stimu- 
lated his own enthusiasm, and led him to 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 39 

proclaim magnetism as a panacea. He de- 
clared "there is but one health, one disease, 
one remedy." An unfortunate private mis- 
understanding between himself and Dr. 
D'Eslon led him to move from Paris to Spa. 
Ultimately he returned to Paris, and then 
took a step which has led to much animad- 
version on his character. He established a 
secret society, under the name of " The Har- 
mony," where he initiated pupils into the 
mystery of his process, taking from them 
fees of a hundred louis d'or each. By this 
means "he is said," according to Mr. J. C. 
Colquhoun, a relatively recent writer on 
mesmerism, to have realized a considerable 
fortune. M. Deleuze, a leading writer on 
the subject, justifies his action in this matter 
by pointing out that his whole professional 
prospects were merged in his magnetic dis- 
coveries, which had ruined him as an ordi- 
nary doctor. He took the fees from wealthy 
people, and is said to have remitted them 
when would-be pupils were less prosperous. 
Morever, admits Mr. Colquhoun, it is very 
doubtful whether he really acquired the large 
sums he is alleged to have received. . 

In 1784 a Koyal Commission of orthodox 
savants was appointed to inquire into the 



40 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

claims advanced on behalf of the theory of 
animal magnetism. The report was unfa- 
vorable, after an inquiry which the represen- 
tatives of the new science declared to have 
been improperly conducted ; though one em- 
inent physician (de Jussieu) refused to sub- 
scribe to the report of his colleagues, and, 
after a great deal of attention paid to the 
subject, published an independent report 
of his own, entirely favorable to Mesmer. 
Even the general body of the Commissioners 
admitted the effects produced by the mag- 
netic treatment, but repudiated Mesmer's 
theory of a fluid, and preferred hypotheses 
concerning "sensitive excitement, imagina- 
tion, and imitation." 

Mesmer eventually retired in disgust to 
Switzerland, and died at an advanced age in 
1815, closing his career, as he had begun it, 
by practicing magnetic cures gratuitously 
for the benefit of the poor. Beyond a cer- 
tain fancy for surrounding his mode of life 
in Paris with a flavor of mystery and theat- 
rical effect, it is difficult to find any circum- 
stances in Mesmer's life that afford the slight- 
est color for the offensive terms in which he 
has constantly been spoken of, even by some 
students and adherents of his great subject. 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 41 

During Mesmer's life the phenomena of 
animal magnetism, to which attention was 
chiefly called, were those connected with the 
cure of disease. Many societies were formed 
as branches of that first set on foot, and 
while on the one hand the orthodox medical 
scientists of the day continued to treat with 
contempt the belief of those who declared 
that such and such results were accom- 
plished, the volume of experience rolled on 
for all who paid attention to the work in 
progress. A very ludicrous aspect is thus 
put, for students of mesmeric literature, on 
the ignorant conceit of the dominant major- 
ity, who were all the while denying the pos- 
sibility of that which was actually occurring. 
After the foolish bigotry of the doctors at 
large had thus been at war with the plain 
facts of the case for more than forty years, 
medical mesmerism at last received a grudg- 
ing recognition from orthodox science in 
1831. At this date a committee of the med- 
ical section of the French Koyal Academy of 
Sciences was appointed to examine into the 
alleged phenomena of animal magnetism. 
The report made by this committee, after 
long and careful investigations, constitutes 
a remarkable record of experiments on the 



42 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

physical phenomena of the mesmeric state; 
it also goes at length into cases in which pa- 
tients under medical mesmeric treatment 
were clairvoyant in their trances, and accu- 
rately prophetic concerning the subsequent 
course of their maladies. The report, 
signed by nine members of the Academy, is 
apologetic in regard to its assurance that the 
alleged phenomena were true ; but the mem- 
bers say in effect, How can we help our- 
selves? We have taken every possible pre- 
caution to guard ourselves from mistakes, 
and we cannot resist complete conviction. 
An English translation of this report, by 
Mr. J. C. Colquhoun, was published in 
1833. 

From this date the reality of the phenom- 
ena of mesmerism, as far as those are associ- 
ated with its aspects as a curative agent, as 
a method of producing anaesthesia, and as a 
means of producing abnormal mental states 
in which a mesmerized subject may foresee 
the future progress of his own disorder, 
must be regarded as finally established, al- 
though scientific and educated men up to our 
own day maintain an attitude of incredulity 
on the subject, which puts them, for better 
instructed persons, on the intellectual level 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 43 

of the African savage, who does not believe 
in ice. Since 1831, moreover, the experi- 
ence which has accumulated on our hands 
concerning the higher and more purely psy- 
chic phenomena of the mesmeric state is 
such that the same remark really applies 
to every one, however cultivated along some 
lines of mental activity, who remains in an 
attitude of incredulity concerning the typi- 
cal phenomena of clairvoyance and mesmeric 
thought transfer. 

As far back as 1808, Dr. Petetin published 
in Paris a book called "Electricite Ani- 
male," of which the well-known later writer 
on the same subject, Dr. Esdaile, says: 
"Dr. Petetin 's cases alone are sufficient to 
establish the reality of natural clairvoyance." 
Plentiful testimony will be found in this book 
concerning the powers of mesmeric subjects 
of a certain kind to read the contents of 
closed letters and books, and to exercise 
many other faculties of perception quite in- 
dependently of the ordinary sense. 

Among the earliest of Mesmer's disciples, 
the Marquis Chastenet de Puysegur has left 
voluminous writings on the subject of his 
own prolonged and varied practice as a cur- 
ative mesmerist. The edition of his works 



44 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

before me is in four volumes, the last dated 
1809, but this is a second edition, and I 
gather that the first must have appeared in 
1807. This is entitled "Memoires pour 
servir a l'histoire et a l'etablissement du 
Magnetisme Animal." The second volume 
is a general continuation of the first, and the 
third is more especially devoted to "Ee- 
cherches, experiences, et observations physi- 
ologiques sur l'homme dans l'etat de som- 
nambulisme naturel et dans le somnambu- 
lisme provoque par l'acte magnetique." The 
fourth volume, published in 1812, is entitled 
"Les Fous, les Insenses, les Maniaques et les 
Frenetiques, ne seraient-ils que des Somnam- 
bules desordonnes." The whole collection 
of writings embodies an immense accumu- 
lation of experiences with persons clairvoy- 
ant during illness in respect to their own 
maladies. No recent writings on mesmerism 
in its medical aspect have an equal value 
with these, for de Puysegur, working with 
straightforward and earnest faith in his own 
power of alleviating suffering with the help 
of Mesmer's glorious discovery, attained 
brilliant successes, and above all — for later 
students of the subject — has done unrivaled 
service in investigating the prophetic and 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 45 

clairvoyant faculties of mesmeric patients, 
not only in reference to their own but in re- 
spect also of other persons' ailments. On 
this development of their powers he says: 
" Of all the facts of magnetism the most in- 
explicable, and above all the least conceiv- 
able, is, without doubt, that of the vision 
possessed by patients in a perfect state of 
somnambulism in reference to the sufferings 
of others and the knowledge which they 
show of the remedies and measures neces- 
sary for their cure. . . . Anyhow, although 
there is no known phenomena (in other 
branches of science) to which one can com- 
pare the faculty — the fact is nevertheless 
real, as certain as the other manifestations 
of somnambulism already recognized." 

De Puysegur gives full details of the cases 
both of this and of the simpler kinds of 
clairvoyance — in reference to the patients' 
own illnesses — that he had the opportunity 
of dealing with, and they are both numerous 
and remarkable. It seems strange that he 
never apparently investigated the extent to 
which the clairvoyant perceptions he evoked 
could be directed to other subjects besides 
those having to do with physical illness, but 
in the beginning mesmerism was introduced 



46 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

to the world in reference almost exclusively 
to its medical aspects, and it was reserved 
for later inquirers to bring its psychological 
importance into view. De Puysegur never 
seems to have expected the clairvoyance of 
his patients to be prolonged beyond the 
period of their recovery. 

J. P. F. Deleuze was a voluminous, and 
one of the earliest, writers on mesmerism. 
He published several books on the subject, 
amongst others a critical history of animal 
magnetism. He himself was a Frenchman, 
born in 1753. He was attracted to the sub- 
ject of mesmerism by reading accounts of 
magnetic cures in 1785, and subsequently 
accomplished many such cures himself. He 
was a naturalist attached to the Jardin des 
Plantes. In his "Histoire Critique du 
Magnetisme Animal" (Paris, 1813), he very 
effectually rebuts the accusations of impose 
ture brought against Mesmer. This ex- 
traordinary man, he says, gifted with an 
energetic character, was carried away by the 
wonderful successes he obtained into an ex- 
aggerated belief in the range of his discov- 
ery, but the attitude of incredulity, on the 
other hand, in regard to his achievements 
M. Deleuze shows to be altogether unten- 



REAL LITER ATUBE OF MESMERISM. 47 

able. Not only were his numerous pupils 
convinced of the reality of his treatment, but 
the assurances and proofs furnished by per- 
sons who had been cured themselves, and 
who had taken part in establishing societies 
for the cure of others, were such that no op- 
position or ridicule could arrest the progress 
of so useful and well-established a discovery. 
M. Deleuze himself, since he had occupied 
himself with magnetism, could attest that he 
had known more than three hundred persons 
who were occupied with it like himself, and 
who had produced or experienced its vivid 
effects. M. Deleuze deplores that Mesmer 
had not the magnanimity to make public 
his discoveries for the good of mankind with- 
out deriving pecuniary benefit from them, 
but points out that after all he had spent 
money to acquire the right of practicing as 
doctor, and by all ordinary considerations 
was entitled to take money for teaching pu- 
pils. M. Deleuze devotes himself chiefly to 
establishing the reality of the magnetic influ- 
ence as a curative agent by records of cases 
and protracted arguments, and in his sec- 
ond volume gives an interesting summary of 
the books on the subject that had appeared 
up to the date at which he wrote. His 



48 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

"Practical Instructions on Animal Magnet- 
ism " were published in 1825, and have been 
translated into English. The book is de- 
scribed by the translator as the result of a 
consummate experience. In 1836 an earlier 
admirer of Deleuze's work had written: "A 
new era has commenced for magnetism. 
Authentically recognized by the Royal Acad- 
emy of Medicine in 1831, and regarded by 
the commission as a very curious branch of 
psychology and natural history, it has taken 
rank among positive truths. The rising 
generation will be prompt to cultivate the 
new field laid open to them. What surer 
guide can they take than the man who, by 
the superiority of his intelligence, the saga- 
city of his conclusions, and the example of 
his own life, has so powerfully contributed 
to the triumph of this noble discovery. " 

Deleuze says that his object is to give 
plain and simple instructions for people who 
wish to practice magnetism. " It is not the 
object of this work," he writes, "to con- 
vince men who, otherwise well-informed, 
still doubt the reality of magnetism." He 
employs the expression, "the magnetic fluid," 
he says, because he believes in the existence 
of such a fluid, though its nature is un- 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 49 

known. The directions which he gives go 
into great detail in regard to manipulation 
and passes, and most later handbooks of mes- 
merism seem to have derived their inspira- 
tion very largely from this code of rules. 
The author also discusses the accessory 
means by which magnetic action may be in- 
creased, namely, mesmerized water, woolen 
and cotton cloths, plates of glass, etc. The 
purpose in view is almost exclusively to in- 
struct the reader in methods of mesmerism 
to be employed for the cure of disease, and 
the book is entirely concerned with such di- 
rections, or with criticisms on various modes 
of mesmerizing, the risks to be avoided, and 
the methods that may be employed for "de- 
veloping and fortifying one's self in mag- 
netic power." A voluminous appendix, 
added to an American edition of the work 
by the translator, Mr. Hartshorn, gives an 
immense quantity of testimony collected 
by him concerning curious and remarkable 
cases of mesmerism. 

J. J. A. Ricard, a Paris professor, is a 
thoroughly satisfactory exponent of mes- 
meric experience, who published in 1841 a 
volume entitled "Traite theorique et pra- 
tique du Magnetisme Animal." He must 



50 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

have been himself a mesmerist of most un- 
usual force, and evidently combined with 
this attribute characteristics which, properly 
handled, would have made him himself a 
sensitive of great value, for he appears 
to have been a spontaneous somnambulist, 
capable on some occasions of writing long 
strings of verses in his sleep, in reference 
to the production of which he retained no 
recollection whatever in his waking state. 
However, this fact crops up merely inci- 
dentally ; his book is devoted entirely to the 
record of his work, which chiefly has to do 
with curative mesmerism directed by the 
pathological clairvoyance of his patients, for 
with him it seemed as if almost every one 
who approached could be thrown into a mag- 
netic trance. There is something very puz- 
zling to modern practical students in the im- 
mense advantage apparently enjoyed by the 
early mesmerists, as compared with our- 
selves, in reference to the prevalent condi- 
tion of people around them. In the present 
day we may be able to get results which 
when obtained are fully as good in all re- 
spects as those described by the early French 
writers ; but the persons with whom such re- 
sults are procurable seem to be dotted here 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 51 

and there about the world, by ones and twos, 
whereas such mesmerists as M. Ricard seem 
always to have been puzzled if they did not 
succeed with the premier vejiu. Their rec- 
ords of distinct successes run into percentages 
like seventy -five or eighty of the total num- 
ber of persons with whom they made experi- 
ments. Ricard treats with scorn the pre- 
tenses of some disputants to account for 
mesmeric phenomena by imagination, fas- 
cination, and other vague hypotheses in con- 
flict with the simple and, to him, undeniably 
true theory of mesmeric fluid. The falsity 
of their judgment he thinks may easily be 
demonstrated, and he records a case in which 
in order to prove the reality of his own po- 
sition he magnetizes one of his patients at a 
distance, and puts him to sleep without any 
expectation on his part that the experiment 
was going to be tried. For psychological 
students, however, Ricard' s book has claims 
jon their interest which far transcend its im- 
portance as, what it certainly is also, a very 
advanced and intelligent treatise on curative 
mesmerism. Ricard appears to me to have 
been the first experimentalist, or at all 
events the first writer, who gets entirely free 
of the belief that clairvoyance is a merely 



52 THE BATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

pathological condition, and to whom the daz- 
zlingly interesting phenomenon of clairvoy- 
ance, having to do with other states of na- 
ture, presents itself in the light of its real 
importance. He gives a very full account 
of his first experience in this region of in- 
quiry with a girl named Adele Lefrey, who 
exhibited a new kind of lucidity at the con- 
clusion of some curative treatment received 
at her mesmerist's hands. It may be worth 
while here to translate a short passage illus- 
trative for all who have themselves been 
privileged to work with sensitives qualified 
to discern higher states of nature, of what 
may be called the inevitable routine of im- 
pressions such people go through in the first 
instance. M. Ricard's Adele said to him 
words conveying exactly the same ideas 
which I have heard uttered by sensitives 
under my own influence, young girls to 
whom the A B C of mesmerism as a branch 
of knowledge was wholly unknown. M. 
Eicard writes : " She was near the comple- 
tion of her cure, when, in the midst of some 
new medical instructions which she was giv- 
ing, she said to me in a singular tone, 'You 
hear what he orders me? ' 'Who,' I asked, 
'is ordering you anything?' 'Why, mon- 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 53 

sieur, do you not hear him? ' 'No, I neither 
hear nor see any one/ 'Ah, that is true,' 
she replied, 'you sleep while I am awake.' 
'What do you mean? You dream, my dear 
child ; you pretend that I sleep, when I have 
my eyes open and I can appreciate all that 
passes before me, while I know that I actu- 
ally hold you in command by my magnetic 
influence, and that it only depends upon my 
will to bring you back to the state you were 
in recently. You believe yourself awake be- 
cause you speak to me, and you have to a 
certain extent your free will, although you 
could not open your eyelids, and might be 
plunged in an instant into the most prof ound 
slumber. You do not reflect upon what you 
are saying.' 'You do not understand me, 
monsieur, but that is nothing surprising.' 
'You are asleep,' I replied. x 'I am, on the v/^ ^5/ 
contrary, as completely awake as we shall all 
be some day in the future. I will explain my- 
self more clearly ; all that you see at present 
is gross, material; you distinguish apparent 
forms; the real beauties escape you. How 
could it be otherwise? Your spirit is 
cramped, obscured, by the exterior impres- 
sions that your material senses give you. 
It can only reach out feebly, while my cor- 



54 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

poreal sensations are actually annihilated, 
while my soul is almost disintegrated from 
its ordinary fetters. I see what is invisible 
to your eyes, I hear what your ears cannot 
hear, I understand what for you is incom- 
prehensible. For example, you do not see 
what emanates from yourself and comes to 
me when you magnetize me; I, on the con- 
trary, see it very clearly; at each pass you 
direct towards me I see a little column of 
fiery dust which comes from the end of your 
fingers and seems to incorporate itself in me. 
Then when you isolate me I seem surrounded 
by an atmosphere of this fiery dust, which 
is often the reason why objects of which I 
seek to distinguish the forms take a ruddy 
tinge for me. I hear, when I desire it, a 
sound that is made at a distance, sounds 
which may arise a hundred leagues from 
here. In a word, I am not obliged to wait 
till things come to me, I can go to them 
wherever they are, and appreciate them more 
correctly than any one could who is not in a 
similar state to that in which I find myself. ' " 
This is a perfectly sound and correct ex- 
position of the state in which the liberated 
Ego of the sensitive finds itself. Phrases of 
precisely similar import have, as I say, been 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 55 

given to me more than once ; and I venture 
to say that any one in whom the faculty of 
clairvoyance, in reference to other planes of 
nature, is possible will, on first entering into 
that state, if questioned, take the same view 
of the position. 

Under the title "Archiv fur den Thieris- 
chen Magnetismus," an immense collection 
of writings on mesmerism in all its branches, 
as then understood, was published in Ger- 
many in 1817. This work is in twelve vol- 
umes, edited by Dr. von Eschenmayer, Dr. 
Kiefer, and Dr. Nasse. It consists of nar- 
ratives of experiments and magnetic cures, 
and careful critical essays, including specu- 
lations on the meaning of clairvoyant previs- 
ion which show a more intelligent attitude of 
mind on the part of the German writers of 
that date than was common in England. 

Baron du Potet, sometimes called de Sen- 
nevoy, after an ancestral domain, is to be 
ranked among the early French writers on 
mesmerism, though he lived to within a few 
years ago. He was born at Sennevoy, in 
the Department of the Yonne, in 1796. He 
has given us a sketch of his own career at 
the beginning of one of his later books, and 
it appears that he was first attracted to the 



56 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

study of human magnetism in 1815. The 
whole subject burst upon him as a revela- 
tion. " En sortant de ce premier entretien" 
he says, "fetais magnetiseur." He at once 
obtained the mesmeric trance with the two 
persons on whom he first tried his hand. He 
became acquainted with Deleuze and de Puy- 
segur. He undertook the cure of some pa- 
tients; dazzled with the results he entered 
himself regularly for the study of medicine. 
As a mesmerist he rapidly distanced his 
teachers. He boldly confronted the ridicule 
and opposition of conventional science. He 
gave gratuitous courses of instruction in 
mesmerism from the year 1826, and at the 
same period began to write on the subject. 
He published a Journal called the "Propa- 
gateur du Magnetisme;" also in 1838, in 
London, a volume entitled "An Introduc- 
tion to the Study of Animal Magnetism." 
This is an admirable book. It shows us the 
author still unable to believe that the tena- 
city of ignorant prejudice could hold out 
against an overwhelming demonstration of 
the truth. "Hitherto," he says, "there has 
been a disinclination to entertain this inves- 
tigation, but 1 trust the evidence now ad- 
duced will tend to dispel the prejudice that 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 57 

can only have arisen from the science not 
having been yet fairly represented." The 
book opens with a good review of the history 
of the subject. Speaking of Mesmer, the 
Baron says : " Surrounded as he was by en- 
emies, both public and private, his unassum- 
ing manners, his manifest sincerity, his ear- 
nest yet silent enthusiasm, and, above all, 
his benevolent disposition, conciliated for 
him the esteem of persons of almost all ranks 
and pretensions." Later on the Baron goes 
into a full and detailed description of the 
physical and psychical phenomena of mes- 
merism as illustrated by his own experience. 
His records are of great instructive value 
and would alone be sufficient to establish the 
reality of clairvoyance as a fact in nature, 
even if they were not, as they are, merely 
one set of such experiences among a great 
number. 

The only fault that can be found with du 
Potet's books is, that their style is a little 
inflated or bombastic. In this respect he is, 
however, the product of French and not 
English literary traditions, and throughout 
he is immensely impressed with the prodi- 
gious spiritual importance of the discoveries 
with which he is dealing. As he himself 



58 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

says, lie felt a new philosophy forming itself 
in his mind around these germs 5 it was neb- 
ulous and undefined, but stupendous. He 
was filled with ideas that he felt to be too 
far advanced for his generation. He only 
ventured in 1845 to give them some expres- 
sion in a work entitled "Essai sur l'enseigne- 
ment philosophique du Magnetisme." But 
though this volume is relatively timid and 
reserved, the author was quickly outgrowing 
the limits of magnetic practice as familiar to 
his predecessors. He was becoming some- 
thing more than a mesmerist — an occultist, 
and eventually, under somewhat too theat- 
rical or sensational a title, he printed an 
important quarto called "La Magie De- 
voilee," which was never published, in the 
ordinary sense of the word, but delivered 
to a few persons under definite pledges taken 
from them in regard to the use they would 
make of it. The experiments described in 
this book, though startling and almost en- 
tirely of psychological interest, do not really 
outrun those related in the "Animal Mag- 
netism " in scientific value for the student 
of mesmerism. The Baron seems to have 
been himself almost alarmed by the power 
he acquired over all kinds and conditions of 



REAL LITEBATUBE OF MESMEBISM. 59 

people by causing them to look at signs and 
figures lie drew with charcoal upon the floor. 
He got these signs from books on mediaeval 
magic, and was apparently inclined to at- 
tach too much objective importance to the 
diagrams themselves, thinking that other 
people would be able to obtain his results by 
following the same procedure, and that pow- 
ers of a dangerous character might thus be 
acquired through his teaching by persons 
of evilly disposed nature if his instructions 
were carelessly disseminated. He did not 
realize how far the magic lay in his own 
magnetic force — how little of it had to do 
with the signs. 

In 1840 Baron du Potet published an- 
other volume called "A Course of Magnet- 
ism in Seven Lessons," and in the course of 
his addresses to his pupils, in themselves a 
numerous body, to whom he dedicates this 
volume, he indulges in some very scornful 
language concerning the obstinate incredu- 
lity exhibited by the scientific world at large 
in regard to the accumulated facts of mes- 
meric experience. 

M. Alexandre Bertrand seems to have 
been the first writer who quarreled with 
the straightforward theory of the magnetic 



60 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

fluid adopted by Mesmer, de Puysegur and 
Deleuze. In 1826 he published a treatise 
entitled "Du Magnetisme Animal en 
France," in which he promulgated a theory 
of his own on what he calls V Extase — the 
condition of those whom the earlier writers 
described as somnamhules. This is not a 
work of any value in itself, and is chiefly 
remarkable as showing how very little orig- 
inality there was in Mr. Braid's later claim 
to have put the whole subject on a new and 
scientific footing. M. Bertrand incidentally 
admits that his own somnamhules bear testi- 
mony to the reality of the fluid. Many of 
these, he says, "declare in fact that they see 
the fluid by means of which I exert an effect 
upon them coming out from my fingers." 
The patients with whom he worked would 
also declare that they discerned a peculiar 
taste in water that he had magnetized, and 
experienced pronounced effects from objects 
he had magnetized, such as a handkerchief, 
a glove, or a piece of money. For all this, 
however, he found a sufficient explanation 
in the theory that they had been possessed 
with such ideas before going to sleep ; and 
for him magnetism is "une pure cliimere." 
That which he conceives to be a reality is 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 61 

Vextase — "a condition into which human 
creatures are capable of falling, altogether 
distinct from any states that had been pre- 
viously recognized." The argument amounts 
to nothing in itself, explains nothing, and is 
only carried on by disregarding the larger 
part of the phenomena admitted as facts and 
requiring to be brought within the area of 
any genuine mesmeric theory. 

M. Aubin Gautier is one of the early 
writers who must by no means be overlooked. 
He seems to have written, to begin with, in 
1840 a volume entitled "Introduction au 
Magnetisme," a volume written in a very 
reverent spirit, and on the basis of much 
careful research in ancient history, aimed at 
showing the wide diffusion of magnetism in 
one shape or another as a psychological 
agent in Egypt, Greece, and Rome. M. 
Gautier seems to have been amongst those 
from the first who took the subject seriously 
and in the spirit of an occult student. 
Whoever expects to find these pages amus- 
ing, he says in the beginning, "deceives 
himself strangely. The study and practice 
of magnetism demand an unheard of pa- 
tience, silence, and self-control." 

The book is more a review and a specula- 



62 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

tion than a narrative. It rests, of course, 
in complete reliance on the mesmeric fluid 
theory, and only fails in bringing out really 
scientific conceptions because the writer was 
not himself in possession of those side lights 
on mesmerism which I propose to deal with 
directly, and without which the various phe- 
nomena themselves can never be coordinated. 
In 1842 M. Gautier published his "His- 
toire du Somnambulisme," again sweeping 
the wide areas of ancient history for illus- 
trations of his theme. This volume, in- 
cluding many narratives of more modern 
origin, gives a full account of M. Pigeaire 's 
experience with the Academie de Medecine 
of Paris. M. Pigeaire was a country doctor 
who discovered fine clairvoyant faculties in 
the youngest of his daughters, Leonide, aged 
ten years. No experimentalists in those 
days seemed to have realized the lengths a 
clairvoyant faculty could reach to when prop- 
erly cultivated, so that the only experiments 
tried with the girl had to do with recogniz- 
ing objects and reading from books when 
blindfold. Her powers in this direction 
were brought to high perfection in a long 
series of private and domestic seances. 
When at last M. Pigeaire decided to claim 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 63 

on his daughter's behalf a prize which had 
been offered by a member of the Academie 
de Medecine, the family genius was brought 
out of her retirement and introduced in 
Paris to a great number of learned obser- 
vers. The prize in question had been offered 
by Dr. Burdin to any one who could read 
without the use of the eyes, of the sense of 
touch, or of light. The Academie de Mede- 
cine was to arbitrate on any claims that 
might be made. While the Pigeaire family 
were staying in Paris they seemed to have 
given a series of private entertainments at 
which Leonide's faculties were exhibited, 
and a large number of persons distinguished 
in science, literature, and social rank signed 
records of the successful experiments. 
When the time came, however, for M. Pi- 
geaire to interview the committee appointed 
by the Academie de Medecine, he found 
them perfectly unprepared to investigate and 
adjudicate upon what actually took place, and 
only willing to deal with Mile. Leonide if 
she would conform precisely to their own 
arrangements and conditions, among which 
were that she should wear a peculiar kind of 
helmet mask which they had constructed, 
and let one of their number keep his hands 



64 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

on her eyelids all the time. In all its details 
the story is instructive to any one interested 
in looking back on the thoroughly unscientific 
attitude of mind taken up by the represen- 
tatives of physical science in those days in 
their dealings with mesmerism. But I can 
hardly give space here to all the ramifica- 
tions of the story. M. Pigeaire tried to 
make his surly inquisitors understand that 
the whole psychic condition of his daughter 
required delicate and gentle treatment, that 
their own proposals were calculated to throw 
her into convulsions rather than into the 
clairvoyant state, that the bandages he em- 
ployed, using masses of cotton wool to cover 
the eyes completely, were of such a kind 
that any pretense of distrusting their efficacy 
was ridiculous, but all to no purpose. The 
committee refused even to look at his band- 
ages, and after he left them in disgust sent 
in a report, the general drift of which was 
that the proposed experiments had been de- 
clined except under conditions which the 
committee did not conceive bore evidence 
of bona fides. 

In their zeal to discredit the subject the 
committee even ventured upon some state- 
ments that were positively false, wishing to 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 65 

lead the reader into the belief that they had 
interviewed the proposed clairvoyante. But 
nowhere in 1838 was any scientific body pre- 
pared to observe the conditions of fair play 
or common honesty in dealing with the rep- 
resentatives of mesmerism. 

In telling the story, however hastily, one 
should not omit to mention one concluding 
incident. A group of those persons who had 
witnessed the earlier series of preliminary 
seances with Leonide, took M. Pigeaire's 
part very warmly. They raised a consider- 
able guarantee fund and publicly offered a 
prize ten or twelve times greater than that 
originally offered by the Academy, to any 
member of that body who should be able to 
read a single word of print when his eyes 
had been bandaged on the plan adopted with 
Mile. Leonide by her father. It is need- 
less to say nobody took up the challenge, 
and that the whole incident thus constitutes 
a very round and complete illustration of the 
gross dishonesty with which the high author- 
ities in medicine in Paris conducted the 
war against the new discovery. 

A year or two later, in 1845, M. Gautier 
published a third book called a " Traite pra- 
tique du Magnetisme et du Somnambulisme." 



66 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

This is a well-arranged and well-indexed 
treatise on magnetism in all the branches 
then studied, and though very imperfectly 
divining the real potentialities of psychic 
mesmerism, is even to this day a solid book 
of careful record and earnest thinking, im- 
measurably better worth attention than any 
of the recent volumes that play up to the 
fashionable errors of the moment. 

M. L. A. Cahagnet seems to have been 
one of the very few French writers of this 
period thoroughly alive to the psychic pos- 
sibilities of clairvoyance. He undertook a 
prolonged series of mesmeric seances with 
clairvoyants whose attention he directed to 
other planes of existence, and these are re- 
corded in a book entitled "Arcanes de la 
Vie Future Devoilee." The value of the 
statements made by his clairvoyants in ref- 
erence to the future life will of course be va- 
riously estimated by different readers, but 
from the point of view of mesmeric science, 
the facts concerning the mental phenomena 
exhibited by the subjects under treatment 
are of the highest interest. An English 
translation of this book has been published 
in America. 

Dr. Esdaile's "Mesmerism in India" is a 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 67 

record of the author's extraordinary success 
in the application of mesmerism to his sur- 
gical practice at the government hospital in 
Calcutta, of which he was in charge- The 
book was published about 1842. It includes 
not only minute surgical reports of frightful 
operations performed upon the mesmerized 
patients of the hospital without any suffer- 
ing or consciousness of what was taking 
place on their part, but also corroborative 
testimony from a great many of the most 
distinguished people resident at Calcutta at 
the time, who were called in by Dr. Esdaile 
to be present at these wonderful perform- 
ances. 

A later work by the same author, "Nat- 
ural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance," published 
in 1852, includes, besides a quantity of 
fresh testimony connected with the medical 
aspects of mesmerism, an epitome of evi- 
dence extracted from the " Zoist," and from 
other sources, on the subject of clairvoyance 
exhibited during the mesmeric state. In 
this book Dr. Esdaile also recounts the 
progress of his own struggle at Calcutta in 
the effort to press the importance of mes- 
merism upon the attention of the other doc- 
tors of the place, who would only plod along 



68 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

the beaten path. This narrative is, in some 
respects, the history of Mesmer's own career 
over again. Instead of being treated by his 
professional brethren as a benefactor of hu- 
manity, Esdaile was opposed and vilified by 
all the devices that prejudice and professional 
jealousy could suggest, and while it was no- 
torious that he was daily performing painless 
operations on patients under mesmerism, the 
other doctors continued to torture their own 
unfortunate victims rather than confess that 
they had been in error in resisting the use 
of the new curative agent. 

Dr. Esdaile 's remarkable works are not 
the only records of capital operations per- 
formed without pain to the patient with the 
help of mesmerism. A paper read before 
the Eoyal Medical and Chirurgical Society 
of London, in 1842, and published as an 
independent pamphlet, gives full details con- 
cerning a case in which Mr. Ward, a sur- 
geon attached to St. Bartholomew's Hospi- 
tal, had, about that time, amputated a man's 
leg above the knee while he, the patient, re- 
mained completely unconscious of the opera- 
tion in a mesmeric sleep, put upon him by 
the influence of Mr. Topham, a barrister 
interested in the practice of mesmerism. 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 69 

The pages of the "Zoist," to which I will 
refer directly, are laden with reports of 
other similar cases. 

Dr. Scoresby, the Arctic voyager and 
well-known writer on various branches of 
maritime science, was a careful experimenter 
in mesmerism, and a work of his called 
"Zoistic Magnetism " records a great deal of 
his work. He had only a limited experi- 
ence of the higher phenomena, but a very 
extensive familiarity with the physical phe- 
nomena of the mesmeric state, including 
those on the border-land between the lower 
and higher, having to do with the transfer 
of sensation from the mesmerizer to the sub- 
ject. His book was published in 1849, and 
is interesting for students of the science for 
its careful observation in regard to the po- 
larity of different parts of the human body 
in respect to the emanations of its animal 
magnetism. 

An interesting "Report upon the Phe- 
nomena of Clairvoyance or Lucid Somnam- 
bulism, from Personal Observation," was 
published in 1843 by Edwin Lee, Fellow 
of the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society, 
and of many other societies abroad of a sim- 
ilar character. The cases here described 



TO THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

have reference altogether to clairvoyance on 
the physical plane, that is to say, to the ob- 
servation by the clairvoyants concerned, of 
distant places and houses, and also of ob- 
jects in their own immediate neighborhood, 
which they had no means of cognizing 
through the usual senses. Mr. Lee also 
wrote about the same time a book on "Ani- 
mal Magnetism," containing a comprehen- 
sive review of similar experiments by other 
observers. 

Another work well worth notice is entitled 
"Facts in Mesmerism, with Reasons for a 
Dispassionate Inquiry into it," by the Rev. 
Chauncy Hare Townsend, first published in 
1839. This opens with a dedication to Dr. 
Elliotson, from whose experiments, the au- 
thor says, the greater part of the English 
world have derived their ideas of mesmer- 
ism. He quotes Dr. Wilson, of the Mid- 
dlesex Hospital, who having been present at 
a lecture at Dresden, when several fish in a 
large tub of water were stunned by an elec- 
tric shock, tried the effect of mesmerizing 
the water. The fish revived. The incident 
suggested the proposal that great use might 
be made of mesmerized water in medicine. 
In a preface to his second edition Mr. Town- 



HEAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 71 

send says: "I now cast my mite into the 
treasury of evidence that is accumulating in 
favor of mesmerism with a deep regret that 
prejudice should yet stand in the way of so 
much alleviation of human suffering as it is 
calculated to afford." The book consists of 
a patient record of the author's own experi- 
ments, which were largely concerned with 
interesting phenomena of "sleep waking," 
as Dr. Elliotson called it, or mesmeric clair- 
voyance of the simpler kind. Mr. Town- 
send began with incredulity, but was drawn 
into serious inquiry in 1836. He worked at 
this for a long time and with a great num- 
ber of subjects. His records include a 
great variety of facts in thought and sensa- 
tion transference, and in connection with the 
development, by a mesmerized person, of 
perceptive faculties in nerve-centres not 
usually betraying these. He also throws 
out a good deal of intelligent speculation 
concerning the media through which mes- 
meric effects are wrought. Though priding 
himself on keeping his experiments and in- 
vestigations on a relatively humble level, 
and testing the faculties of his subjects by 
applying them to the commonplace facts of 
life, Mr. Townsend treats with contempt 



72 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

"the imagination theory" as "really too ab- 
surd to merit a serious refutation. A thou- 
sand times I have seen mesmeric patients 
placed under circumstances where the action 
of imagination was plainly impossible." 
And later on he writes : " An elastic ether 
modified by the nerves, and the conduction 
of which depends on their condition ; which 
can be thrown into vibration mediately by 
the mind of man and immediately by the 
nervous system, which manifests itself when 
thrown out of equilibrium, and produces 
mental eifects through unusual stimulation 
of the brain and nerves, cannot but be al- 
lowed to be a cause which answers to all the 
conditions that we desire to unite, and which 
is sufficient to account for the phenomena 
that we have been considering." 

The "Zoist" was a magazine, published, 
I believe, under the editorship of Dr. Elliot- 
son, "to collect and diffuse information con- 
nected with two sciences — Cerebral Physi- 
ology and Mesmerism." "The science of 
mesmerism," says the inaugural article in 
the first number, brought out in April, 
1843, "is a new physiological truth of incal- 
culable value and importance; and though 
sneered at by the pseudo-philosophers of the 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 73 

day, there is not the less certainty that it 
presents the only avenue through which is 
discernible a ray of hope that the more intri- 
cate phenomena of the nervous system — of 
life — will ever be revealed to man. Al- 
ready it has established its claim to be con- 
sidered a most potent remedy in the cure of 
disease; already enabled the knife of the 
operator to traverse and divide the living 
fibre unfelt by the patient. If such are the 
results of its infancy, what may not its ma- 
turity bring forth?" The thirteen volumes 
of this magazine, for it was continued up to 
1856, constitute a splendid reservoir of infor- 
mation on all branches of mesmeric science. 
In the farewell address, published with the 
last issue of the Review, the conductors say 
their mission has been accomplished. Their 
object was neither gain nor worldly reputa- 
tion, but the establishment of truth. For 
thirteen years they have amassed fresh facts 
in cerebral physiology and mesmerism, "and 
presented them in such numbers, and with 
such proofs, that to question them would be 
absurd." They speak of the "glorious do- 
ings of Dr. Esdaile in India," which the 
"Zoist" has chronicled, and though mainly 
dwelling on the achievements of medical 



74 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

mesmerism, they point to the examples of 
clairvoyance which abound in their volumes, 
and which render the phenomenon unques- 
tionable, though of course gross imposition 
is practiced in regard to it by professional 
clairvoyants and private persons "influenced 
by vanity or wickedness." 

Only less abundant than the proofs of the 
reality of mesmeric phenomena with which 
the pages of the "Zoist" teem, are the illus- 
trations it gives of the senseless and bit- 
ter hostility which was opposed to it by the 
majority of the medical men of its time, and 
of what Dr. Elliotson, in one letter to the 
Review early in the proceedings, calls the 
"anti -mesmeric falsehoods of medical men." 
The favorite theory of the anti-mesmeric doc- 
tors in regard to celebrated surgical opera- 
tions conducted painlessly under mesmerism, 
used to be that the sufferers had "feigned" 
insensibility. That any one could soberly 
pretend to believe that patients undergoing 
the frightful torture of first-class surgical 
operations could subdue all outward signs of 
suffering in the interests of the new "impos- 
ture," shows us the depth of folly to which 
prejudice and bigotry may sink the under- 
standings of people still capable of exhibit- 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 15 

ing a form of intelligence in connection with 
their own commonplace pursuits. 

Dr. Elliotson says of his medical confreres 
at large that they were as brainlessly indif- 
ferent to mesmeric phenomena "as the cattle 
grazing in the meadows are to the wonders 
of the steam carriages passing by them on 
the railroads. " With sorrow we must recog- 
nize that this contemptuous lament is hardly 
even as yet out of date. 

"Isis Revelata, an Inquiry into the Ori- 
gin, Progress, and Present State of Animal 
Magnetism," by J. C. Colquhoun, 1836, is 
a very comprehensive review of the subject, 
up to the period at which the author wrote. 
Its publication is justified, in the introduc- 
tion, on the ground that the report of the 
French Academy of Sciences, of 1831, had 
completely superseded the earlier unfavor- 
able report of 1784. It had been supposed, 
Mr. Colquhoun points out, that animal mag- 
netism was a system of quackery and delu- 
sion. " This objection, which might perhaps 
have had some plausibility during the in- 
fancy of the discovery, has now become 
utterly ludicrous, and betrays either con- 
summate ignorance of the subject or gross 
dishonesty." Mr. Colquhoun takes a highly 



76 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

favorable view of Mesmer's life and charac- 
ter, and quotes a dignified letter in which he 
refuses an offer of a pension of 30,000 
francs a year, made to him by the King of 
France through the Minister Maurepas, on 
the ground that the offer relates to his pecu- 
niary interest alone, and does not recognize 
the importance of his discovery as its princi- 
pal motive. The question ought, Mesmer 
thinks, to have been approached in a totally 
opposite way. This, Colquhoun remarks, 
"is not the language of avarice." 

"The Modern Bethesda, or the Gift of 
Healing restored," is a narrative, or rather 
a compilation from letters, newspapers, and 
testimonials of all sorts, relating to the al- 
most innumerable achievements in healing 
the sick, performed both in America and 
England by Dr. J. R. Newton. This won- 
derful mesmerist — a worker of miracles by 
wholesale — was born in Rhode Island in 
1810. The earlier part of his life was spent 
in a prosperous mercantile career, and his 
peculiar gifts were not developed till 1858. 
Then he began to travel about in the United 
States, visiting thousands of patients, and 
performing "those marvelous and inexplica- 
ble cures which astonish the world and 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 77 

threaten to revolutionize all former laws and 
experience of medical science." He had dis- 
covered his own powers during a voyage in a 
crowded passenger steamer, where the yellow 
fever broke out among thirteen hundred pas- 
sengers. In Ohio, where he began public 
ministrations, he treated about one hundred 
persons a day, performing in the course of 
time many thousands of wonderful cures. 

My purpose in reviewing the books men- 
tioned above has not been to compile any- 
thing resembling a complete bibliography of 
the subject, but simply to show my readers 
what a wide field the early literature of mes- 
merism offers for their exploration. But 
even this rapid survey of its resources would 
be incomplete without a reference to one 
which for many modern readers is the stand- 
ard work on the subject, Dr. Gregory's 
"Animal Magnetism," first published, I be- 
lieve, in 1851, and again in other editions at 
later dates. It is a very fine review of the 
whole subject in all its branches, and is a 
good first book for any new student of mes- 
merism to take up. 

The "Mesmerist," a weekly journal of 
Vital Magnetism, was published in London 
in 1843. It was begun in May of that 



78 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

year, and continued till September, when its 
publication ceased. It abounds in interest- 
ing records of mesmeric experience in all 
branches and in good articles vainly combat- 
ing the crass indifference and incredulity of 
the public. 

In contrast to this mass of literature, 
which in reality renders any dispute as to 
the truth of mesmerism equivalent to a 
dispute as to whether Columbus was right 
in believing that a continent exists to the 
west of the Atlantic Ocean, we may use- 
fully turn for a moment to the conventional, 
orthodox notices of the subject in those mir- 
rors of popular ignorance concerning all 
psychic science — the encyclopaedias of the 
day. 

The Oxford Encyclopaedia, published in 
1828, describes animal magnetism as "an 
appellation given to a pretended science, 
which during the last century excited consid- 
erable attention in several parts of Europe." 
After giving a caricature account of Mes- 
mer's operations, the writer goes on to de- 
clare that in the end it became evident the 
patients "were impostors, or in a most 
wretched state of debility both of mind and 
body." The article concludes by remarking, 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 79 

" it is needless to add that his doctrine is now 
almost entirely exploded." 

Dr. Rees' "Cyclopaedia of Arts, Sciences, 
and Literature," 1819, disposes of the whole 
subject in a very charming paragraph. 
"Animal Magnetism," it says, "is an ap- 
pellation given by some designing or self- 
deceived operators upon the credulity and 
purses of mankind, to certain practices by 
which, under the pretense of curing diseases, 
various effects were produced on the animal 
economy, such as faintings, partial and even 
general convulsions, etc. ; " and referring to 
the "able investigation" of 1784, which de- 
molished Mesmer's pretensions, the writer 
concludes by saying that an account of it 
will be found "under the article Imagina- 
tion." 

Chambers' Encyclopaedia, in the edition 
of 1884, after briefly glancing in a colorless 
tone at the earlier history of mesmerism, 
takes refuge in the investigations of Mr. 
James Braid as settling the character of 
mesmeric phenomena all round. "Unfortu- 
nately," it says, "the evil reputation which 
the subject had so naturally obtained pre- 
vented the due appreciation of Braid's dis- 
coveries," — the discovery in question being 



80 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

really little more than an incomplete and 
misleading theory concerning a subdivision 
of mesmeric phenomena, unscientifically sep- 
arated for the purposes of a preconceived 
hypothesis, from others incompatible with 
that hypothesis. The writer in the en- 
cyclopaedia follows Braid's plan, however, 
and confines his attention to incidents of 
mesmeric experience which seem to lend 
color to the hypnotic theory, lightly remark- 
ing of the rest, "no scientific observer has 
ever confirmed the statements of mesmerists 
as to clairvoyance, reading of sealed letters, 
influence on unconscious persons at a dis- 
tance, or the like; " a statement which might 
be paralleled if we were to say, "no scien- 
tific observer has ever confirmed the state- 
ments of travelers and sailors concerning 
the existence of an American continent 
with trees, population, lakes, rivers, and the 
like." 

The eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, in a brief account of Mesmer's 
life, represents him as a detected impostor, 
and without one word to indicate that there 
is even any considerable body of opinion op- 
posed to that view, ignores the report of 
1831, and refers to the report of the com- 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 81 

mittee of 1784 in the following terms : "The 
proceedings of Deslon, the pupil of Mesmer, 
were scrutinized by a committee of inquiry, 
consisting of the physicians Majault, Sallin, 
d'Arcet, and Guillotin, and the academi- 
cians Franklin, Le Roy, Bailly, de Bory, 
and Lavoisier. The report drawn up by 
Bailly thoroughly exposed the falsehood and 
imposture of the mesmeric process. . . . 
The disciples of animal magnetism attempted 
to check the advance of their enemies by 
forming themselves into societies. Mesmer, 
more politic, escaped amid the general con- 
fusion, carrying with him a subscription of 
340,000 francs, and at the same time the 
secret for which that sum had been given to 
him." 

A somewhat different tone is taken up in 
the recent ninth edition. Mesmer is now 
spoken of cautiously as a man who made 
many converts, who was stigmatized as a 
charlatan, but who was undoubtedly a mys- 
tic, and who was honest in the belief that 
the phenomena produced were real. A timid 
reference to Reichenbach's discoveries in 
odyllic force is then put forward. " The 
idea that some such force exists has been a 
favorite speculation of scientific men having 



82 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

a bias towards mysticism, and it makes its 
appearance not unfrequently." "The next 
great step in the investigation of these phe- 
nomena," the "Britannica" then proceeds, 
"was made by James Braid, a surgeon, in 
Manchester, in 1841," — and it goes on 
to connect the whole remainder of a long 
article with the weak and insufficient hy- 
pothesis of this very shallow thinker. 

To comment adequately on the attitude of 
mind of writers who, remaining thus en- 
tirely outside the area of knowledge concern- 
ing psychic science in any of its branches, 
have, nevertheless, the audacity to flirt their 
incredulity in the faces of wiser and better 
informed men, would claim the use of 
stronger language than I care to employ. 
No one, it is true, deserves blame for leaving 
any subject that does not attract him alto- 
gether unstudied. But in most cases people 
who are conscious of limited intellectual 
resources entertain a decent respect for 
others better furnished. A man may be 
nothing but a sportsman himself and yet 
refrain from asserting that chemists and 
electricians must be impostors. And a 
chemist may know nothing of Italian art, 
and yet may refrain from declaring that 



REAL LITERATURE OF MESMERISM. 83 

Kaphael never existed. But all through the 
commonplace world, whether in its upper or 
lower strata, people who are ignorant of 
psychic science encourage one another in the 
brainless and absurd denial of facts exhib- 
ited in the encyclopaedias, and in an even 
more grotesque and impudent fashion by 
the newspapers of the day, whenever any of 
its phenomena come up for treatment. The 
average country grocer, the average news- 
paper reporter, the average student of physi- 
cal science, are all steeped in the same dense 
incapacity to understand the propriety of 
respecting the knowledge of others, even if 
they do not share it themselves, whenever 
they brush up against any statement relating 
to the work of those who are engaged in any 
branch of psychic inquiry. From the occult 
point of view, indeed, one can understand 
why this should be so. The incredulity of 
unspiritual mankind is Nature's own protec- 
tion against those unfit as yet to use her 
higher gifts. That is all in the legitimate 
order of things ; but the more spiritualized 
minority need not play up, on their part, to 
that incredulity. It is their duty to war 
against it, and in the course of that strife, 
by slow degrees, the intelligence of the com- 



84 THE BATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

monplace herd will be leavened, and their 
minds, growing within them in spite of their 
own complacent unconsciousness of the pro- 
cess, be qualified gradually for a more pro- 
gressive evolution. 



CHAPTER IV. 

SIDE-LIGHTS ON MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 

Any one who goes patiently through any- 
considerable body of early mesmeric litera- 
ture will be struck by the manner in which 
each writer in turn handles his subject as 
something expected to rest upon the body of 
observation, whatever it may be, that he has 
been enabled to undertake, and without 
realizing the all - important consideration 
that when we come to deal with natural phe- 
nomena having to do with the subtle forces 
of vitality, and the even more subtle forces 
which regulate the phenomena of conscious- 
ness in higher states of nature, we cannot 
make sense of any observations without being 
in a position to comprehend something of 
the general natural design of which they 
form a part. The stars were seen in the sky 
long before astronomers were fortified with 
the mathematical and other knowledge that 
enabled them to design a working hypothesis 
of the universe sufficiently approximative to 



86 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

the truth to render intelligent observation 
possible; but until that time people who 
merely looked at the heavenly bodies moving 
about in the sky, and theorized on the basis 
of such observations alone made a terrible 
hash of their conjectures as to what was go- 
ing on. Similar remarks may broadly be 
made about every science in turn. Early 
chemistry was a mere blind groping in the 
dark amongst phenomena which could un- 
dergo no coordination until some considerable 
advance had been made in comprehending 
the elementary structure of all bodies, and 
the leading principles of chemical combina- 
tion. Not of course until the molecular con- 
stitution of matter was realized did chemistry 
begin to assume anything like the dignity of 
a fully matured science. Now the observa- 
tion of the facts of mesmerism is exactly an- 
alogous to the observation of stars carried 
on from the point of view of an astronomer 
knowing nothing of gravitation or of the 
relations between the planets and the sun. 

The mere facts are interesting, as the 
mere sight of the heavens must have been 
impressive even to the most uninstructed star- 
gazer; but the facts themselves, however 
carefully codified, will never enable students 



MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 87 

to assign them to their proper realms of na- 
ture, or indeed to develop anything like a 
rational theory of their causation. The only 
scientific method by which they can be ex- 
amined must have to do with some prelimi- 
nary theory of psychic science, correspond- 
ing, for example, to the theory of molecular 
matter to which the influence of previously 
observed facts in chemistry can be applied. 

But truly to the world at large up till a 
very recent date there has been no theory of 
spiritual science available, even as something 
to be checked by the observed facts of mes- 
meric experience; and of course even now 
the great bulk of the cultured community is 
neglectful of the important acquisitions in 
this respect which have lately been made 
and offered for the service of all who care to 
make use of them, in some measure through 
my own instrumentality. With the full ex- 
position and vindication of that teaching I 
am not at present, as far as this volume is 
concerned, desirous of occupying my read- 
ers; but I am in this dilemma, that while 
believing I can bring into an orderly and 
coherent science the hitherto disorderly and 
apparently chaotic facts of mesmeric obser- 
vation, I can only do this by constant refer- 



88 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

ence to the body of spiritual teaching set 
forth in modern theosophical literature. 
Mesmerism can be explained by what is 
called the esoteric doctrine, and certainly in 
no other way, but a belief in mesmerism or 
at least in some few of the facts that mesmer- 
ism is concerned with has been recently dif- 
fused to an enormous extent amongst my- 
riads of people who have never heard of the 
esoteric doctrine. These people cannot as 
yet realize why it must remain impossible 
for them to understand mesmerism without 
going behind it in search of mysteries about 
which they are wholly uninformed; and yet 
it is absolutely impossible by any simple 
straightforward attack upon the problems 
that mesmerism presents to us to bring them 
into harmony with the workings »of natural 
law, or, in other words, to make sense of 
them. 

Reflection on the character of the prob- 
lems to be dealt with ought, however, to 
convince even those who know nothing of 
occultism as a science, that there must be 
such a science, or the potentialities of such a 
science, lurking somewhere in the back- 
ground. Straightforward investigation of 
mesmeric phenomena shows us at all events 



MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 89 

the magnetic fluid proceeding from the oper- 
ator, and bringing about results — how, no 
one can guess. But though susceptible of 
being seen by some people, the magnetic 
fluid itself is imperceptible to most eyes 
among those that may look for it, and clearly 
belongs to a different order of natural phe- 
nomena from those that are entirely subject 
to sense perception. What ought to be the 
effect of such an extremely impalpable agency 
when it touches the organism against which 
it is directed? If it is capable of producing 
any effect upon that organism at all it must 
be through some attributes inherent therein 
which are of its own nature. The psychic 
force, in point of fact, thrown out by the 
will or thought of the operator, has got to 
influence the will or thought, of the subject 
first, and then to get at the body, if that is 
the object in view, through the corresponding 
principles of the sensitive's organization. 
Everything that has to do, therefore, with 
the non-physical planes of Nature comes 
within the purview of those who would arm 
themselves for the purpose of comprehending 
mesmerism in a scientific spirit. 

This consideration is one of the most im- 
portant that can be presented to the general 



90 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

reader in connection with the current revival 
of mesmerism. The idea is simple ; I have 
expressed it already. Mesmeric phenomena 
are either wholly or partially psychic in their 
nature. We cannot understand them unless 
it is possible to investigate the realm of na- 
ture in which the laws governing our psychic 
consciousness are really operative. Any 
theorizing concerning external facts in mes- 
merism which aims at accounting for these 
by the materialistic science of old-fashioned 
medical practice, must necessarily be doomed 
to failure. But I must be pardoned for 
dwelling a little more on the idea, because 
until people recognize and act upon it, there 
cannot be any such general progress in con- 
nection with spiritual knowledge and 
achievement as a truly intelligent apprecia- 
tion of mesmerism might bring in its train. 
Look at the way in which even the sciences 
of the physical plane rest now upon one an- 
other as their higher mysteries are explored. 
Chemistry and electricity at one time seemed 
lines of inquiry standing quite apart. Now, 
of course, they are so intimately blended, 
that electricity is as much a reagent of chem- 
istry, in its relations with that science, as 
hydrochloric acid. This is the case even al- 



MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 91 

though the laws of matter to be investigated 
are laws of matter alone. But when we 
take a living human being and endeavor to 
investigate him, it is not enough to be ac- 
quainted with the organism that expresses 
his consciousness. However deeply the ma- 
terialistic physiologist may penetrate the in- 
tricacies of this organism, he will always be 
brought up abruptly on the threshold of 
consciousness, and will frankly recognize that 
farther than this it is impossible for him to 
go. Too often indeed he is inclined to put 
the idea in words that imply too much, and 
he may say it is impossible for any one else 
to go beyond the barrier he finds so impass- 
able. That is just the mistake he makes, 
and there is more pompous conceit than real 
modesty in the commonplace phrases by 
which people are in the habit of proclaiming 
the orthodox boundaries of their knowledge. 
"No one knows, no one can ever know, any- 
thing of the mysteries lying on the other 
side of death." So commonplace writers 
will frequently affirm with absurd confidence 
in the certainty of their own universal neg- 
ative, This attitude of mind is what has to 
be broken down on the part of modern Eu- 
ropean thinkers generally, before the lines 



92 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

of study can be taken up which will really 
conduce to the comprehension even of so 
midway a series of phenomena as those of 
mesmerism. When people say as above, 
"No one knows, no one ever can know," 
etc., they are simply making a false state- 
ment which vast bodies of experience con- 
tradict every day. 

In one sense, up till now, most people 
eould afford to keep their eyes shut to the 
superphysical realms of nature. The work 
of their progress was strictly associated with 
the exploration of physical nature. That 
has been the function of this expiring cen- 
tury in a preeminent degree; and the cen- 
tury could perform its work, so to speak, 
without knowing anything about the spirit- 
ual planes, but that will no longer be the 
case with the next century. Here we are 
already face to face with this complicated 
question as to what mesmerism really is ; we 
are confronted by a mass of ill-understood 
phenomena. But ill-understood though they 
may be, they are now at all events so com- 
pletely recognized that future generations 
will infallibly be concerned with them to 
a considerable degree; investigating them 
intelligently or clumsily, pushing them to 



MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 93 

beneficial or mischievous developments ; but 
every one will be hopelessly entangled with 
them unless dealing with them as partly be- 
longing to the spiritual planes. The living 
man with his interior consciousness of self 
and individuality is on two planes of nature 
at once, as a ship is in two media at once, 
half in the water and half in the air. To 
manage your ship successfully you must take 
cognizance of the laws governing each of 
those media. To deal successfully with 
your human being you must understand his 
physiology no doubt, but you must equally 
understand his psychology, and something 
of the collateral phenomena of nature in 
those regions or planes thereof, to which the 
phenomena of the psychic man belong. 

So now, though feeling by reason of the 
double illumination which occult study has 
provided for, fairly qualified to explain 
many of the phenomena of mesmerism which 
have hitherto been left the prey of mere un- 
intelligent wonder, I am at the same time 
constrained to say that no one can hope to 
make head or tail of any really true and sci- 
entific rationale of mesmerism unless he 
will first take the trouble to comprehend oc- 
cult teaching, up, at all events, to a certain 



94 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

point. We must realize something of what 
occultists mean by the astral plane before 
entering on the consideration of how the 
consciousness of a mesmerized object behaves 
when translated to that plane. But, on the 
other hand, this book cannot be a treatise 
on occult science at large. That should be 
dealt with and investigated as an indepen- 
dent study by any one who aims at a really 
thorough grasp of its principles. What I 
have to do therefore for the moment is to 
make a statement concerning the esoteric 
teaching which gears in with the facts of 
mesmeric science, asking the reader to treat 
this for the time being as simply a working 
hypothesis. If as a working hypothesis it 
be found that all the facts of mesmerism are 
thus provided with a rational setting, that 
perhaps may be regarded as a provisional 
consideration in favor of the esoteric teach- 
ing, and may perhaps impel students to in- 
quire into it a little further. But of course 
I will not delay my readers on the threshold 
of the subject with which I am now specially 
concerned, in order to set forth, in the ex- 
planations it may here be necessary to give, 
anything resembling a complete argument 
on behalf of the occult theories concerning 
life and the higher aspects of nature. 



MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 95 

The esoteric or occult science view of 
man's constitution is the important branch 
of the subject to be put here in the fore- 
ground. This is represented as consisting 
of several principles, and the classification is 
at all events far more scientific in its char- 
acter than that which sums up the human 
being as consisting of a body and a soul. 
We need not quarrel with the body and soul 
division as far as it goes, but it does not go 
far, and, above all, sins against accuracy in 
overlooking the manner in which the lower 
principles of man merge gradually into the 
higher through some of an intermediate 
character. It is with these intermediate 
principles that mesmerism has especially to 
do, and it is with a view of getting the 
reader to understand the classification at all 
events, even if he does not at the moment 
accept it, that I wish now to describe what 
is called the septenary division of man. 

We have got clearly to deal first of all 
with the matter constituting his body, mat- 
ter which is analyzable into its organic ele- 
ments, its carbon, phosphorus, oxygen, and 
other gases. By chemical processes of na- 
ture, carried on first of all in the vegetable 
world, the inorganic matter of which the 



96 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

man's body is composed has somehow been 
converted into organic matter before it ac- 
tually takes part in the complete structure of 
his bones and flesh. This life principle, 
which differentiates organic from inorganic 
matter, is the second principle of man, and 
may for the moment be called vital force. 
But thus far we are thinking merely of mate- 
rial atoms, vitalized, it is true, but under no 
direction which impels them to assume the 
form of a human body. People content 
with a merely conventional knowledge of na- 
ture trouble themselves little as to how or 
why the atoms group themselves as they do 
during the growth of a human being. Oc- 
cult science, more penetrating in its vision, 
discerns an underlying pattern, so to speak, 
consisting of materials wholly unlike those 
of the physical plane, and belonging indeed 
to what by the conventionalities of occultism 
is called the astral plane ; and this pattern, 
or ground-plan, of the human being is recog- 
nized as the third principle, and may be 
called the astral body. It is quite visible 
when detached from the physical body to 
those who are gifted in any high degree with 
clairvoyant vision. 

The fourth and fifth principles of man to- 



MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 97 

gether constitute what may be held to corre- 
spond with the ordinary idea of the soul, but 
occultism thinks of the soul as complex in its 
constitution. As every one can see, it has 
affinities for earthly and material sensations, 
pleasures and pursuits, while at the same 
time it is also gifted with sympathies in a far 
loftier direction. That these very different 
aspects of the soul are seated during the life 
of the complete individual in different vehi- 
cles — to use an oriental metaphor — is one 
of the fundamental conceptions of the sep- 
tenary division, and the lower of these two 
vehicles, the fourth principle of man, is most 
conveniently described by the term "animal 
soul," while the fifth is the truly "human 
soul," itself more or less pervaded by the 
sixth, or "spiritual soul," which, though ex- 
isting undeniably in germ in every human 
being, is, for a great many of us unfortu- 
nately, a potentiality rather than an accom- 
plished fact. The seventh principle on the 
occult scale is that infinite, sublime, in- 
comprehensible universal Spirit in which all 
the phenomena of nature are in some wholly 
unfathomable way involved; out of whose 
infinite potentiality all manifestation arises, 
in which, whatever they may be, there re- 



98 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

side the attributes that human speculation, 
vaguely groping after the unattainable, as- 
signs to divinity. 

Fine and elaborate as this division will 
appear as contrasted with the more element- 
ary conception of the soul and the body, it 
is not by any means complicated enough to 
account for all the phenomena which have to 
do with either of these principles taken by 
itself. I do not conceive, for example, that 
the matter would be correctly put if I simply 
said "that which we may call the mesmeric 
fluid is the vital energy," or second principle 
on the classification just described. But 
certainly it has very close relations with that 
force, and one of- the correct interpretations 
of mesmeric phenomena in the humbler lev- 
els of these would recognize animal magnet- 
ism as equal to the task of restoring lost vital 
energy, and thus accomplishing beneficial 
effects on the human system where no spe- 
cific illness has to be considered, and where 
nothing but a healthy stimulus is wanted to 
reestablish vigor. 

The close relations between animal mag- 
netism and vital energy may be observed in 
very interesting experiments which have 
sometimes been carried out, though rarely 



MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 99 

by European mesmerists, in connection with 
the vegetable kingdom. It is possible to 
mesmerize a plant, and procure specific and 
distinct results in connection with the direct 
stimulation of its growth. That these re- 
sults have sometimes been pushed to what 
seemed at a first glance quite miraculous 
lengths by some oriental adepts in mesmeric 
science, is, I believe, a fact, although unfor- 
tunately the existence of such a possibility in 
the background, as it were, of nature's re- 
sources is but too often made the excuse in 
India for juggling of a most commonplace 
type, which pretends to reproduce the 
vaguely talked of feats of the great occult- 
ists, just as amongst ourselves commonplace 
conjurors derive from rumored wonders con- 
nected with spiritualism suggestions for 
their own illusions. 

The various principles of man that I have 
been describing make up the complete man in 
the aggregate, just as, to use a rough illus- 
tration, the sails as well as the keel of a ship 
contribute to make up the complete vessel. 
But the sails belong in their nature and are 
adapted to one medium with which the vessel 
is concerned, the air ; the keel is adapted to 
the other. Any one observing the keel from 

LOFC. 



100 THE BATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

the point of view of the medium to which it 
belongs, if himself a fish and unqualified to 
take note of natural phenomena above the 
surface of his own element, would not be 
able to account always for its behavior. 
What, for instance, could explain to him the 
reason why the keel might sometimes be 
slewed very much to one side as the vessel lay 
over to the wind? The observer of the kind 
I have imagined would be related to such 
a phenomenon just as the mere physical sci- 
entist amongst ourselves is related to phe- 
nomena which have to do with the human 
consciousness. 

I rather cling to this illustration of the 
vessel belonging to two media, because it 
will help to show, in reference to the princi- 
ples of man, that although the higher and 
the lower principles during life are closely 
intermingled with each other, the higher 
nevertheless belong by their nature to other 
planes than that with which our eyes and 
senses make us familiar. Take, for exam- 
ple, the astral principles of a man's body 
and lower soul. All the time that the body 
is in the physical plane (if one may use that 
expression) these astral principles are in the 
astral plane of nature, coextensive with the 



MESMEBIC PHENOMENA. 101 

physical, permeating it everywhere, consti- 
tuting its second aspect, and, above all 
things, filled with the phenomena properly 
appertaining to it, just as the physical plane 
is filled with the scenery and decorations of 
nature, with the animal and vegetable king- 
doms as well as with the humanity which 
presides over all. And this is the second 
great idea amongst those taught by occult 
science which I want my readers to keep 
hold of, at all events as a working hypothe- 
sis, — namely, that the planes of nature of 
which I speak as higher or superior to those 
which we see around us, are all abundantly 
stocked with the beings, things, objects of 
creation, whatever we may call them, which 
properly belong to their nature, while to a 
consciousness which becomes translated to 
any one of these planes such scenery or in- 
habitants will be as fully perceptible as the 
scenery and inhabitants of the earth are per- 
ceptible to waking vision. These planes of 
nature do not divide themselves in precise 
accordance with the septenary division of 
human principles of which I just spoke, but 
for the purposes of what we are now consid- 
ering we must realize two great phases of 
nature, or planes, above that of the visible 



102 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

earth, the nearest to us being the astral, the 
next what I will here call the spiritual plane. 
It is towards this latter that the soul of a 
human being should ultimately aspire, but 
it is quite certain that with every human 
being who is first released from the imprison- 
ment of the flesh, whether by the solemn 
process of nature at death, or by the inter- 
vention of mesmeric influences during life, 
it is quite certain, I say, that the astral 
plane will be the first on which that con- 
sciousness reopens after quitting the physi- 
cal. The further progress upwards, indeed, 
is one claiming so much from the soul that 
aims at it, that a great number of very good 
mesmeric sensitives may not be enabled to 
accomplish it. The astral plane thus be- 
comes much the most important for the pur- 
poses of studying commonplace mesmeric 
phenomena. 

When I come to deal with clairvoyance it 
will be necessary to recur to this exposition 
as bearing closely on the magnetic trance; 
but as regards the simpler phenomena of 
mesmerism, in so far as it affects the health 
of the body generally, it is only necessary to 
realize the astral plane sufficiently to com- 
prehend that there we find the bridge of com- 



MESMERIC PHENOMENA. 103 

munication between the senses of the oper- 
ator and the subject, and that all the be- 
wildering experiences connected with sen- 
sitives who taste what some one else tastes 
under mesmerism, and feel the pins which 
prick other people's bodies, cease to present 
an incomprehensible or miraculous aspect 
w r hen we realize the manner in which the as- 
tral plane affords direct communion between 
the consciousness of the operator and the 
subject when the two are brought into true 
magnetic harmony. 

In regard to the spiritual plane, that has 
to do solely with the higher spiritual phases 
of consciousness which mesmerism can evoke 
from a sensitive, and need not be thought of 
except in connection with the most exalted 
sort of clairvoyance ; so that practically for 
a rough comprehension of the rationale of 
mesmerism all I am asking for the moment 
is that my readers should recognize, or at 
all events assume for the purposes of this 
argument, the existence of what has here 
been called the astral plane, the medium of 
nature in which the human will operates 
more directly on sensation than in the me- 
dium of existence which is constituted by 
the physical earth. 



CHAPTER V. 

CUKATIVE MESMERISM. 

A curious tendency of the human mind 
leads a great many people to suppose that 
any given branch of knowledge has assumed 
importance for the first time when it happens 
first to have arrested their own attention. 
Few people would confess this to be the 
truth as regards themselves in a naked way, 
but the whole body of modern literature put 
forth under the hypnotic flag is a ludicrous 
illustration that with society at large that 
rule operates. The names with which "sci- 
entific " hypnotism are most definitely associ- 
ated in modern years are those of Dr. Char- 
cot and Dr. Liebault. But at the same time 
it is a simple historical fact that far more 
was done to establish the scientific truth of 
curative mesmerism by Dr. Esdaile and Dr. 
Elliotson fifty years ago, than either of the 
modern physicians just named have had time 
yet to accomplish. 

For inquirers who at this stage of the pro- 



CUBATIVE MESMERISM. 105 

ceedings wish to know what curative mes- 
merism really can accomplish, Dr. Esdaile's 
books and the "Zoist " remain immeasurably 
the most fruitful literature to take up. The 
only aspect in which, at the same time, they 
are at all defective is that which has to do 
with theory. Falling into a very natural 
error, most of the early experimentalists 
who obtained striking and important results 
came to the conclusion that these would be 
capable of attainment by anybody else who 
tried for them in the same way, and with any 
subjects en whom they might operate. They 
knew they had failures in some cases, but 
they probably did not know the extent to 
which they were abnormally gifted with the 
peculiar reserves of nervous energy required 
to throw off animal magnetism, and one of 
them, as we have seen especially, Baron du 
Potet, is almost ludicrously frightened lest 
the world at large should immediately rush 
forward to repeat his own experiments, the 
bearings of which in some cases he saw, not 
unreasonably, to be fraught with peril. He 
failed to attach sufficient importance to the 
Boeotian lethargy of his generation at large ; 
and we have not yet by any means passed 
beyond that stage of human enlightenment 



106 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

in which we may still rely with a good deal 
of confidence on the stupidity of our contem- 
poraries as a safeguard against their prema- 
ture invasion of occult mysteries. 

But at all events, to go back to Esdaile 
and Elliotson, these two great experimental- 
ists have left volumes of results which it is 
not my business here to reproduce, but on 
which I will venture to make some comments, 
inasmuch as they have made either little 
effort, or obtained but little success in their 
attempts, to account for their own achieve- 
ments. It is enough for the moment as re- 
gards the facts to say that both Esdaile in 
Calcutta, and Elliotson in the North of Lon- 
don, cured serious diseases of almost every 
sort and kind by treatment which involved 
the use of animal magnetism, and of no other 
curative agent whatever. A common and 
absurd allegation put forward by people who 
preserve their opinions concerning the cura- 
tive effects of magnetism, by carefully pro- 
tecting their ignorance of all the facts from 
the invasion of external knowledge, is to the 
effect that mesmeric influence is only bene- 
ficial, when beneficial at all, in cases of ner- 
vous disorder. They might as well say that 
a locomotive engine could only pull a car- 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 107 

riage made of mahogany, and not one con- 
structed of any other wood. The statement 
is simply untrue, and incompatible with all 
experience on the subject, as also it is en- 
tirely out of touch with the theory as to the 
causation at work which we are now in a 
position to frame. 

The records of Esdaile's and Elliotson's 
work will also show numerous cases in which 
operations of the most excruciating order and 
on the largest scale — operations like the 
amputation of a leg, or the removal of some 
internal tumor — have been performed on 
patients rendered entirely insensible to pain 
by purely magnetic treatment. But we may 
make a clear distinction between the anaes- 
thetic effects of mesmerism and the curative 
effects, and in the first instance I propose to 
deal with the latter. 

The first remark one has to make about 
Esdaile's work to begin with is that the con- 
ditions which surrounded him were extraor- 
dinarily favorable. The hospital in which 
he worked was at Calcutta, and the patients 
almost entirely natives of India. As a race 
natives of India are very much more sensi- 
tive to magnetic influence than Europeans. 
This question of sensitiveness is one which 



108 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

requires a great deal of explanation, but 
may be dealt with more conveniently when 
we come to consider the psychic rather than 
the medical department of the subject. El- 
liotson, it is true, worked entirely with Eu- 
ropean patients, but never, as far as records 
show, obtained such startling results as 
those of Calcutta if measured by the propor- 
tion of sensitiveness discovered. Specific 
results in North London were just as good 
in some cases as specific results in India; 
but no intelligent mesmerist setting to work 
in this country would expect for a moment 
to be able to influence as many per cent, of 
the people he might deal with as if he were 
working in the midst of an oriental commu- 
nity. Now, this difficulty about the non-sen- 
sitiveness to mesmeric treatment of a very 
great number of people all over the world, 
and of an especially great number in the 
highly civilized communities of modern Eu- 
rope, is one which no enthusiast for mesmeric 
progress should blink in any way, or attempt 
to underestimate. But, on the other hand, 
we must remember that the highly insensi- 
tive condition of Europeans, which may in- 
terfere for the moment with the practical 
value of magnetic cures, is itself a mental 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 109 

rather than a physical phenomenon. It is 
due to the prevalent attitude of mind which 
highly educated and highly civilized Euro- 
peans generally fall into, and it would un- 
dergo a very great change if the scientific 
nature of mesmeric facts became generally 
understood and relieved, by the sanction of 
high intellectual authority, from the torrent 
of ribaldry with which the whole subject has 
been so long inundated by ephemeral writers 
playing up, as usual, to the greatest igno- 
rance of the greatest number. All that we 
have really to keep in mind is that mesmeric 
influence is not a curative agent which is 
universally applicable ; it is a curative agent 
which is probably more influential than any 
other system medical science has discovered, 
and is certainly susceptible of enormous and 
most advantageous extension. 

But how does the system work? Let us 
see what have been the conclusions as re- 
gards their own part in the cures they have 
worked, of the earliest exponents of mesmer- 
ism who still remain the most remarkable of 
its experimentalists. Esdaile seems never 
to have got much beyond the perception of 
the fact that he could by making passes, as- 
sociated with the exercise of his own will, 



110 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

produce magnetic trances, out of which, 
when it was his will that this result should 
ensue, his patients would emerge either cured 
or very greatly relieved. I doubt if Dr. El- 
liotson developed any theory going much 
beyond this, and indeed, if any mesmeric 
books, old or new, embody any theoretical 
explanations of such phenomena that are 
worth the serious attention of students, I 
know of none such. 

Perhaps this assertion should be qualified 
by some reference to what is called hypnotic 
suggestion as a curative method, for here we 
are certainly in close touch with a theory, or 
if not exactly with a theory as to the inner 
working of the remedy, with a theory which 
advances us one step in that direction. The 
exponents of hypnotic suggestion imagine 
that they dispense in the first instance alto- 
gether with any emanations ; that they bring 
about a condition of partial or complete un- 
consciousness by inducing their patients to 
adopt some auto-mesmeric process, and that 
while in this state they throw into their 
minds, simply by spoken assurance on the 
subject, the idea that when they recover 
their normal state they will find themselves 
better. I am very far from wishing to im- 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. Ill 

ply that this kind of suggestion is never 
really effectual, but I suspect that in most 
cases where it works well the operator who 
directs the whole undertaking has really been 
very much more energetic in the matter than 
he has supposed. After all, magnetic passes 
are merely some among the methods by 
means of which animal magnetism can be 
projected. One of the most potent modern 
mesmerizers whom I have encountered, a 
person in no way associated with any pub- 
licly known undertakings of this kind, has 
never employed passes, but has obtained en- 
tire control of his sensitives by looking at 
them fixedly, and exerting that mysterious 
force which we call the will, without any 
physical manipulation. It would be difficult 
for a doctor instructing a patient, and still 
more difficult if he superintends that patient, 
in the methods required to superinduce the 
hypnotic condition, to avoid contributing 
very largely to the result himself. 

However this may be, operators of the 
latest school are quite on the wrong track in 
devoting themselves to the method of hyp- 
notic suggestion. The leading fact of mes- 
meric science which justifies this last remark 
is that to which I have already referred — 



112 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

the actual objective existence as a fact in na- 
ture, as unequivocal as the steam in a boiler, 
of the mesmeric fluid. Until people who 
are on the path of this inquiry convince 
themselves of this, they will be stumbling 
about in the dark. It is the first all-impor- 
tant leading elementary principle of the sub- 
ject, and any one who attempts to dispute it 
takes up a position which is first of all ab- 
surd to those who, as I said before, are in 
a position to see the fluid in question — as 
certainly, though a much finer phenomenon 
is concerned, as an engineer can see the 
steam pouring out from his exhaust-tubes. 
Secondly, the denial of the fluid theory is ir- 
rational in face of Keichenbach's researches, 
and can only be maintained by virtue of a 
preliminary declaration that these researches 
are falsely recorded. If it is argued that 
Reichenbach is yet almost alone as an ex- 
plorer in that particular range of phenom- 
ena, the answer is that a positive fact, if a 
fact, is still a fact in nature, though it stand 
alone ; and nobody after its establishment is 
entitled to construct a theory of nature with 
which it is incompatible. 

Now this being assumed as the fundamen- 
tal state of our knowledge as to the way in 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 113 

which magnetic cures work, let us go a step 
further in the direction of what I am quite 
ready to treat for the present as a hypothe- 
sis. It is not unreasonable to assume that 
the magnetic fluid which emanates from a 
powerful mesmeric operator is something 
which, in varying degrees, is present in the 
organism of all other human beings. Nor is 
it unreasonable to suppose that a something 
which is clearly allied in a very important 
manner with the innermost vital functions of 
the organism may be in some way or other 
unhealthy when those vital functions are 
manifestly out of order. Now, if that be 
the case, the object we have to accomplish 
in effecting a magnetic cure is to withdraw 
the unhealthy fluid which has accumulated 
in the organism of the sufferer in the first 
instance, and replace it with that of a more 
healthy order from a vigorous and wholesome 
constitution. And clearly when we want to 
replace one thing by another it is possible to 
do this in two ways ; one a rough way, and 
the other a neat and relatively scientific 
method. We may simply force in the new 
influence, trusting that it will by its own 
abundance somehow expel and drive off that 
of which we want to get rid, or we may, by 



114 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

an arrangement of our energies far more eco- 
nomical as regards the expenditure of force, 
get rid first of the evil entity, whatever it 
is, fluid substance or magnetism, and then 
replace it by as much as may be required 
to fill the void, of a more wholesome order. 
So far, it seems to me, the most successful 
among well-known curative mesmerists have 
blundered on the rougher of these two ex- 
pedients. Without apparently stopping to 
think the thing out, and certainly without 
coming to the conclusion that the underlying 
cause of illness must be an illness, so to 
speak, in the sufferer's own personal mag- 
netism, they have simply drenched him with 
the emanations of their own healthier organ- 
ism, and have obtained, no doubt, from this 
somewhat extravagant process, results which 
were often highly satisfactory. An immea- 
surably more scientific way of going to work, 
however, is to withdraw first of all the un- 
healthy, or to use a convenient expression, 
the bad magnetism, and then replace it by 
an entirely separate operation. How is this 
to be done? some one may ask; and the an- 
swer is, by a very much simpler method 
than the apparent obscurity of the subject 
would seem to foreshadow. 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 115 

Whether people understand what they are 
doing or not, if they try to mesmerize, and 
hold out their hands with that end in view, 
making passes or simply pointing the fingers, 
as they may choose, what they are really 
doing is this : they propel the magnetic fluid 
accumulated in their own system in the di- 
rection they choose that it shall go — that 
choice being really little more than empha- 
sized in their minds by the fact that they 
are perhaps pointing in the same direction 
— by means of an exercise of will-power, 
which, great or little in its intensity, is the 
outcome of their wish to obtain success. 
The magnetic fluid does not simply flow from 
the fingers because they are extended in one 
direction or another. Nothing whatever 
will pass without the hidden influence of the 
will-force in the background, any more than 
a bullet will pass out of a gun without the 
expansion of the gases in the rear. 

Now, that being so as regards the emission 
of mesmeric fluid, how are you to reverse 
the process and draw from a patient the bad 
magnetism of which you want to free him? 
By nothing more elaborate than the exercise 
of the will to that end, associated with pre- 
cisely the same mechanical method of em- 



116 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

phasizing your own will that would be em- 
ployed in the other case. The fingers of a 
mesmerist pointed to the forehead of a pa- 
tient may be made to suck in or draw out 
from the patient a current of magnetism, just 
as with the other intention the same condi- 
tion of things would be seen by a person 
whose sight was properly developed to in- 
volve the emission of a current. For all 
such purposes, indeed, as the withdrawal of 
bad magnetism, something more than the 
mere contiguity of the operator's fingers is 
desirable. The complete touch of the whole 
hand is a mechanical arrangement lending 
far more assistance to the will-power than 
any other arrangement ; and it will be seen 
that in having arrived at this conclusion 
along the path of purely scientific specula- 
tion we have got back to the famous old bibli- 
cal method, — the laying on of hands. The 
hands laid on may be thought of in the op- 
erator's mind with a view of intensifying 
their influence to the utmost, as sponges ap- 
plied to a wet surface with a view of sopping 
up the moisture ; that is to say, he will think 
of them with reference to the bad magnetism 
he wishes them to withdraw, in a way which 
is precisely analogous to the illustration just 
given. 



CUBATIVE MESMEBISM. 117 

But what is he to do with the bad magnet- 
ism when he has sopped it up in his hands? 
And here at the very outset of the matter we 
come to an extremely important consideration 
which is constantly overlooked by the earlier 
writers on mesmerism. You must get rid 
of the bad magnetism in some definitely final 
and specific way if you want to accomplish 
any permanent cure of the patient, for one 
very good reason ; because, if you do not, it 
is more than likely that the evil of which you 
have relieved him will lodge in your own 
system, and unless it happens that the store 
of magnetic energy in your own system is so 
extraordinarily abundant that it drives out 
the intruding evil, you will set up in your 
own physical conditions of health something 
very like the disorder you have cured. On 
a small scale it is worth while to acquire for 
one's self a mild disorder to bring this truth 
home to the mind. I have repeatedly given 
myself headaches by taking them away from 
others, leaving out by deliberate intention, 
or perhaps in some cases by carelessness, the 
precautions which I knew ought to be taken 
to guard against that result. 

How, then, to get rid of bad magnetism 
from hands which are laden with it ; that is 



118 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

the problem with which we have now to deal. 
Again, for all practical purposes the result 
is obtained by a simple effort of will in that 
direction, associated with gestures which 
stimulate the intention. If the hands are 
withdrawn from the patient, and the gesture 
is made in a free direction of throwing off 
whatever they may contain, exactly as if they 
were wet and the operator were trying to dry 
them by flourishing them about in the air, 
the desired end is reached under most of the 
simple conditions which ordinary mesmerism 
would be concerned with. To make the 
matter theoretically clearer, however, we 
must dive a little more deeply into the mys- 
teries of the superphysical regions of nature 
lying all around us. Of these I shall have 
to speak a good deal more when dealing with 
the higher spiritual aspects of mesmerism, 
but up to the present time it has not been 
necessary to touch that side of the subject. 
The ordinary curative influences can be 
worked without reference to the higher 
planes of nature, just because they are con- 
cerned with the phenomena of the lower 
plane — with mere physical illness. But 
now in some degree the refinement with 
which we are dealing does impinge on the 
higher branch of the subject. 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 119 

A well-known and even hackneyed expres- 
sion describes dirt as "matter in the wrong 
place," and involves, perhaps, a deeper phil- 
osophy than Lord Palmerston, who was, I 
believe, its real author, troubled his head 
with at the time. Hardly any matter is ab- 
solutely evil, and in its right place may fall 
into the general scheme of natural processes. 
So with what, for convenience' sake, I have 
called bad magnetism. That may be very 
bad indeed when concentrated in a human 
organism, but may not necessarily be wholly 
without suitable affinities in the vast field of 
nature's operations. There are, according 
to the teachings of occult science, entities in 
nature on the superphysical plane in which 
such bad magnetism would find its own 
sphere, I will not say absolutely of utility, 
because that would be begging a very com- 
plicated question, but at all events its own 
appropriate sphere. A very prolonged dis- 
sertation on the subject would be required 
to elucidate, as far as that might be possible 
for us, the real nature of the elemental en- 
tities to which I refer, but at all events it is 
to that destination the bad magnetism with- 
drawn from a subject in illness has to be 
sent if the operator wishes to get rid of it 



120 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

entirely, as of course lie does. The mere 
gesture of throwing it off from himself with 
the intention of getting rid of it will, in all 
probability, throw it into what may be called 
the sphere of attraction of those currents, 
forces, or entities — whatever we like to call 
them — which will carry it away from all 
further relations with ourselves. But, of 
course, if the operator is gifted with suffi- 
cient astral sight or clairvoyance himself as 
to see the process carried out, he will be 
very much more successful in getting rid of 
the evil. 

And for those who realize the process I 
have just described, a new interest may at- 
tach to many biblical phrases in which it is 
distinctly referred to for those who compre- 
hend the symbology, and shown to be pres- 
ent to the knowledge of those earlier occult- 
ists who practiced mesmerism many thou- 
sand years before Mesmer. For example, 
the very well-known parable of the herd of 
swine, in regard to which so much egregious 
nonsense has been written both by those who 
endeavor to represent it as a literal histor- 
ical transaction, and by those who conceive 
that the authenticity of the biblical narrative 
is upset by dwelling on the immoral absurd- 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 121 

ity of the story taken literally, is significant 
for those who understand the affinities be- 
tween certain orders of elemental currents, 
and what we are here talking of as bad mag- 
netism. The herd of swine simply stand as 
a symbol for these elemental currents or en- 
tities, and the meaning is that when the 
devil cast out of the man who was afflicted 
— or, in our more scientific phraseology, 
when the bad magnetism withdrawn from 
him — had to be disposed of by the supreme 
operator concerned, it was disposed of in the 
proper way, and not left to hang about the 
aura : of either himself or the bystanders. 

1 It is impossible to explain the real theory of mes- 
merism without using 1 some words very familiar to stu- 
dents of occultism in other branches, but perhaps requir- 
ing 1 a brief explanation here. The "aura" is the term 
employed to denote that cloud of astral matter, that is to 
say, of matter belonging to the next plane of nature 
above the physical plane, which surrounds every human 
being, and by a large number of adequately gifted peo- 
ple can be seen by a finer development of that faculty 
already referred to as enabling some people to see the 
mesmeric fluid, or, as it would sometimes be called by 
occultists, the magnetic aura. The condition of the 
aura has almost an unlimited signification for those who 
are properly instructed in the interpretation of its signs, 
but without going into those of its aspects which have no 
direct concern with my present subject, it is enough 
to say that the aura in every case would be violently 
affected by conditions of disease, and while the restora- 



122 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

When such bad magnetism is left to hang 
about the aura of the operator it may, as al- 
ready suggested, develop in himself the 
very ailment from which he has cured his 
subject, if his own physical constitution 
present any weakness in that direction. Or, 
if this does not take place, another very cu- 
rious result may follow, which is illustrated 
by an occurrence within my own knowledge. 
A lady, troubled with very long-seated and 
severe rheumatism, was cured by a mesmeric 
operator in Paris, and went away well satis- 
fied to another part of Europe. Four years 
afterwards the old pain, which had never 
troubled her in the interval, returned with 
its old virulence, and she hastily sent to in- 
quire after the operator who had dealt with 
her so successfully. It turned out that he 
had died at exactly the period when her com- 
plaint returned. Other similar cases are 
spoken of in some of the mesmeric books, 
and the explanation simply is that in such 
cases the operator has never got rid of the 

tion, in a person who had heen ill, of healthy conditions 
would manifest itself in the purification of the aura, it is 
equally a converse possibility that influences of a rela- 
tively immaterial character in the first instance affecting 
the aura, might afterwards express themselves in physi- 
cal conditions. 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 123 

bad magnetism. It has never found a lodg- 
ment in his own system, because that has 
been too healthy to allow of its ingress, but 
when all the attractive forces of his own life 
are broken up at its close, the bad magnet- 
ism, released from its temporary entangle- 
ment, flies back to its own previous habitat, 
like any electric current following the chan- 
nel of least resistance. 

At the present moment the most ener- 
getic of modern physicians amongst ourselves 
in England who are endeavoring to apply 
some of the lessons of mesmerism to the cure 
of disease, have drifted into the practice of 
what is very well known now as "hypnotic 
suggestion; " and I am very far from wish- 
ing to imply that that system is inoperative 
or delusive. Within the system of every 
human being there are springs of force 
which can be called into activity by hyp- 
notic suggestion, even to the expulsion of 
bad magnetism, and the apparent production 
of a cure. I say apparent, because under 
this arrangement no very great likelihood 
that the bad magnetism will be finally ex- 
pelled from the patient's aura is set up. 
Moreover, this complicated reflection has to 
be taken into account, one which all modern 



124 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

followers of the hypnotic school have entirely 
overlooked in dwelling on the existence of 
another danger to which they assign perhaps 
exaggerated importance. It is a common- 
place of modern writing on the subject that 
purely hypnotic treatment, that is to say, 
the establishment of conditions of what we 
call the mesmeric order in a patient's system 
by means of external mechanical applica- 
tions, like revolving mirrors, or what not, is 
free from the peril attached to the influence 
which a mesmerist obtains over his subject 
if similar conditions are established by 
means of passes in the old way. Now, of 
course, it is perfectly true that to a certain 
extent the mesmeric operator obtains influ- 
ence over his subject, and if the same oper- 
ator and the same subject go on working to- 
gether for a long period of time, and trance 
conditions are constantly reestablished, the 
influence of the mesmerist becomes enor- 
mous. That influence, however, does not 
spring into sudden magnitude all at once on 
a single occasion. Here again qualifications 
have to be introduced which I will discuss in 
their proper place in regard to the sudden 
results obtained with entire strangers by 
professional mesmeric exhibitors ; but these 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 125 

really fall into a different category from the 
cases with which we are concerned for the 
moment. It is most emphatically true that 
no mesmerist influencing a subject for a cura- 
tive purpose would suddenly acquire fatal 
supremacy over the morale of that subject: 
but from the point of view which I fully rec- 
ognize — that after a time when the influ- 
ences had been frequently repeated such con- 
trol would be possible — the reply is that 
people who find the need of being mesmer- 
ized must be exceedingly careful into whose 
hands they trust themselves. 

I think if the idea of medical science of 
the ordinary type were presented to the. 
world now for the first time, timid people 
would be inclined to say, " How frightful the 
notion of following the prescriptions of a 
doctor. If he were malevolently inclined he 
might give us poison or drugs which would 
be otherwise deleterious!" Of course he 
might. In this life we are continually rely- 
ing with more or less confidence on our 
fellow-beings. Sometimes that confidence 
is misplaced, and terrible examples of trust 
betrayed in every walk of life encounter our 
observation ; but as life is organized at pres- 
ent we can only meet that condition of things 



126 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

by taking care as to whom we do trust, 
whether in affairs of every-day life, in busi- 
ness, in affection, in medical practice, or, 
finally, in mesmerism. As for the notion 
that when a mesmerized subject may pass 
under the curious invisible influence of the 
operator, he or she on that account loses the 
normal faculty of will, and is weakened or 
degraded in character accordingly, I venture 
to declare that no shadow of justification for 
that theory can be set up by any legitimate 
appeal to established facts in the psychic 
constitution of man. It is not even true 
that sensitiveness to mesmeric influence is 
necessarily associated, although that some- 
times may be the case, with want of individ- 
ual energy of character. To that branch of 
the subject, however, I must recur later, and 
therefore leave it alone for the present. 
But coming back now to the real danger, 
such as it is, of hypnotic suggestion, as dis- 
tinguished from the other danger, such as it 
is, of mesmeric treatment, we must remember 
that the hypnotic state may very roughly be 
described as an abnormal physical condition, 
and the mesmeric state as an abnormal as- 
tral 1 condition. In some way the nerves are 

1 This term is of universal application in all occult 
writing to that region of nature related to such phenom- 



CURATIVE MESMERISM. 127 

jarred by the peculiar strain imparted to them 
in the first instance through the optic nerve, 
and a mysterious dislocation of the interior 
mechanism of the nerve system is superin- 
duced; and this dislocation once superin- 
duced is very liable to recur under the stim- 
ulus of some casual accident or thoughtless 
act on the part of any person who has once 
acquired the unfortunate art of throwing his 
nervous system into disorder. Like many 
other dangers that we have to recognize as 
theoretically possible in all varieties of mes- 
meric treatment, I am not arguing that this 
one is of very great magnitude, but as far 
as it goes it is a real risk, and the tendency, 
therefore, of hypnotic treatment is distinctly 
more injurious than the tendency of mesmeric 
treatment, always assuming that we do not 
fall into the improbable disaster of putting 
ourselves too trustfully into the hands of a 
consciously malevolent person. 

ena as the aura I have already described. It is a realm 
in itself, of vast complexity, co-extensive with, and quite 
as populous as the physical plane, and filled with as great 
a variety of natural phenomena. Vide books on occul- 
tism generally ; in reference to which I cannot refrain 
from adding that people who put them all aside as un- 
worthy of consideration will never make anything but 
nonsense of their theories concerning either mesmeric or 
hypnotic transactions. 



CHAPTER VI. 

ANESTHETIC EFFECTS AND RIGIDITY. 

Rich as the old literature of mesmerism 
is in evidence concerning the anaesthetic 
effects of magnetism, and though in the ex- 
periments often publicly presented at the 
present day nothing is more common than to 
show how completely the mesmeric trance 
may quench all sense of pain, I do not think 
that any treatise on the subject has hitherto 
made an attempt to account, in anything 
that can be called a scientific manner, for 
these remarkable phenomena. Least of all 
have the modern writers — limiting them- 
selves willfully to a contracted view of the 
whole subject — been in a position to inves- 
tigate the real causation of mesmeric anaes- 
thesia. It would indeed be impossible to do 
this with any prospect of success without 
taking into account the deeper occult science 
of the whole subject, and no ordinary know- 
ledge acquired by the simple examination of 
the human physique could enable any mere 



ANAESTHETIC EFFECTS. 129 

physician to guess at the manner in which 
magnetic force operates to suspend the normal 
activity of the nervous system. Any at- 
tempt, indeed, to investigate the more subtle 
characteristic of the human organism, with- 
out taking into account some of those higher 
principles which are not within the cogni- 
zance of the ordinary senses, and still less 
open to investigation by the instrmnents of 
the dissecting room, must necessarily prove 
abortive. The seat of consciousness is not 
in the physical matter of the body, and thus 
all questions having to do with the manner 
in which consciousness of pain can be sus- 
pended, must concern themselves, even if 
they do not have to go higher, with the as- 
tral principles of the subject. 

Now I have already pointed out that that 
force itself which differentiates organic from 
inorganic matter is already one which apper- 
tains to the astral plane, and I have also in- 
dicated that the septenary division of prin- 
ciples, described in a preceding chapter, must 
be itself still further analyzed before we can 
fully apprehend the working of consciousness 
even in its least elevated forms. And thus 
the force of which I have now to speak, al- 
though not belonging to any higher stratum 



130 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

of the human constitution than the second 
principle, nevertheless is itself distinct from 
vital energy in its simplest aspect. The 
truth is, that when we talk of the nerves as 
the channels for conveying sensation in the 
one direction to the true Ego, or in the other 
for conveying the will force of the Ego to 
the bodily organism, we are talking, to use 
a rough but not inaccurate analogy, of the 
steam pipes connecting the boiler with the en- 
gine, while omitting all notice of the steam. 
That wliich really is the medium for the con- 
veyance of consciousness or will, as the steam 
is the medium for the conveyance of force in 
the case of the engine, is what may be most 
conveniently described as the "nerve aura." 
And at this point I know that many read- 
ers will make a pause, and ask by what 
process of experimentation I have arrived at 
the knowledge I possess with regard to this 
nerve aura. My reply is, by the only 
method of investigation which can possibly 
be applied to such a problem. No physical 
experiment can deal with the matter. No 
knowledge to be disinterred from medical 
speculations concerning the nerves and the 
brain will help us one step on the road to- 
wards the conclusions we seek. The only 



ANAESTHETIC EFFECTS. 131 

way of acquiring information concerning 
the higher principles of the human body, is 
by bringing to bear on the problem some of 
those higher principles themselves. To il- 
lustrate what I mean, let me remind readers 
of any books worth speaking of concerning 
curative mesmerism, that no observation is 
more abundantly established, whether by 
the early inquirers, or by those of a more re- 
cent date, who inquire with a higher purpose 
than the mere establishment of a precon- 
ceived hypothesis, than those which show 
that mesmeric patients in trance are enabled 
to prescribe for themselves, to diagnose their 
condition with a confidence completely sur- 
passing the skill of any physical practitioner, 
and above all are especially capable of de- 
scribing the way in which magnetic influ- 
ences work upon them, and to indicate any 
modification that may be required in their 
magnetic treatment. In point of fact the 
mesmeric sensitive becomes clairvoyant in 
reference to such problems as those we have 
under discussion, and can discern the opera- 
tions of nature in connection with the astral 
principles of man which necessarily defy any 
scrutiny from the physical senses. 
Now the early mesmerists, though con- 



132 THE BATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

stantly availing themselves of this fact to 
guide them in the treatment of their pa- 
tients, did not for the most part possess the 
advantage of any occult knowledge to begin 
with, which could prompt them to direct 
their inquiries along fruitful channels such 
as would lead them to generalizations con- 
cerning the forces of the superior planes. 
Realizing myself enough of the esoteric laws 
at work to give greater point and significance 
to my inquiries, I have been enabled, by 
working with sensitive gifts of an unusually 
high order, in the case of some clairvoyants 
with whom I have had to deal, to get these 
mysteries concerning the nerve aura intelli- 
gently explained, and to make out the man- 
ner in which the vital magnetism of a mes- 
meric operator may affect the action of this 
nerve aura in the mesmeric state. 

To realize what takes place, let us, in the 
first instance, imagine a condition of things 
which is not exactly what takes place, but 
will pave the way for a comprehension of 
the actual course of events. The nerve aura 
belonging to any given subject is, in a cer- 
tain sense, a portion of his organism. It is 
in direct relation with the vehicles of the 
higher consciousness — and though undoubt- 



ANAESTHETIC EFFECTS. 133 

edly in the first instance leading along the 
nerves to the brain, is merely at that point 
articulated, so to speak, with the vehicles of 
higher consciousness — with the soul, let us 
say for the convenience of the moment. 
Now, it is a fundamental fact concerning the 
complex organism of which we are speaking, 
that the higher vehicles which, in the normal 
condition of things, are in close and inti- 
mate union — so to speak, in admixture 
with — the matter of the physical body, are 
nevertheless separable therefrom in a way 
that does not involve the final and complete 
separation which takes place at death. Ad- 
vanced students of occultism do not require 
any other argument to support the statement 
I have just made beyond their own constant 
experience of actually separating the con- 
sciousness from the body. But without ap- 
pealing to quite such lofty testimony, the 
records of clairvoyance are fertile in exam- 
ples of cases in which people describe them- 
selves as looking at themselves, — contem- 
plating their own body as from an external 
point of view. 

Without the help of occult science to in- 
terpret what is really taking place in this 
case, some writers are inclined to invent 



134 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

elaborate theories of complicated subjective 
phenomena to account for such transactions. 
In reality they are very simple, and simply 
what they seem. Questioned on this sub- 
ject, any clairvoyant in a genuine magnetic 
trance would describe his consciousness as 
seated in something at all events external 
to his body. Not being on the lookout for 
such conditions, few of the earlier mesmer- 
ists, if any, thought of asking questions 
pointing to such a condition of things, and 
clairvoyants are very rarely spontaneous in 
pouring out information; they require to 
be cross-examined before exhibiting their 
knowledge in full perfection, or rather be- 
fore bringing their emancipated perceptions 
to bear on the problems they have to deal 
with, so as to develop this knowledge if 
required. 

However, taking the fact to be as I say, 
and leaving persons inclined to dispute it to 
search for the evidence in its favor in books 
dealing with occult science generally, let me 
ask my readers now to consider what is the 
situation of affairs as regards the conscious- 
ness that the sensitive out of the body re- 
tains concerning the body he has left behind. 
How, to begin with, has it come to pass that 



ANAESTHETIC EFFECTS. 135 

he is out of the body under the mesmeric in- 
fluence? And here I bring in my strained 
situation in order to make the position more 
intelligible. The magnetism of the mesmer- 
ist has drenched the nervous system of the 
patient, expelling and replacing the nerve 
aura properly belonging to his organism. 
That expelled nerve aura still unites the 
brain with the true consciousness, but there 
is no longer any nerve aura uniting the body 
with the brain. Now, since it is wholly 
along the nerve aura that the message of 
sensation is conveyed, the nerve itself play- 
ing the part that the steam pipe plays to the 
steam, nothing which transpires in connec- 
tion, let us say, with the patient's arm can 
be in any way reported to the seat of con- 
sciousness. The magnetism of the mesmer- 
ist, though a fluid of the same kind in nature 
as the nerve aura it has displaced, is not 
proper to the subject, it does not constitute 
a channel of communication which can reach 
from his arm to his true soul, and all com- 
munication of that kind is thus cut off. 

It will be convenient here at once to bring 
into the field of view another mesmeric phe- 
nomenon besides anaesthesia, pointing out 
that the explanation I am now giving equally 



136 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

accounts for the well-known immobility of a 
mesmeric sensitive in a trance as regards any 
spontaneous movement, and also for the ri- 
gidity of the limbs when they are set in any 
particular direction by the mesmerist. It is 
his intention, working through his own aura 
now intimately blended with the nervous 
system of his subject, which determines what 
state of the muscles shall be superinduced by 
the machinery which the nerve aura controls. 
He extends the sensitive's arm, for example, 
desiring that it shall remain immovable in 
the position in which he places it. By the 
hypothesis no other desire can come into 
play to interfere with that condition of 
things, and immovable, therefore, the arm 
remains. 

Now, in order that what actually takes 
place may be exactly appreciated, I must ex- 
plain here that under no circumstances does 
the magnetism of the mesmerist entirely dis- 
place the nerve aura of the patient, but it 
penetrates and, so to speak, dominates it, 
subduing all its vibrations for the time 
being, replacing it as regards all the activity 
of its functions, and accomplishing in regard 
to the phenomena with which we have been 
dealing precisely what would be accomplished 



ANAESTHETIC EFFECTS. 137 

supposing the original aura were entirely ex- 
pelled. The only portion of the sensitive's 
aura which is not thus dominated is that 
which has to do with the mechanical and in- 
voluntary movement of the body, the action 
of the lungs and the heart, and so on; and 
here in the first instance the activity of such 
nerves can hardly be thought of as directly 
related to the consciousness of the soul. It 
is not necessary to go into a minute exami- 
nation of the way in which the involuntary 
muscles are governed by nerves and a nerve 
aura of an equally involuntary character, but 
it is obvious on the face of things that there 
is a difference between such nervous energy 
and the nerve energy of the voluntary mus- 
cles ; and this may sufficiently explain for our 
present purpose the fact, that whereas the 
voluntary nervous system can be affected by 
the mesmerist's aura in the way I have been 
describing, nature happily guards the sensi- 
tive from the stoppage of the lower vital 
machinery during such a condition. 

It will be seen that the principle of this 
explanation equally covers such cases as I 
have hitherto been thinking of, in which the 
whole physical organism is drenched with 
the operator's magnetism, and the conscious- 



138 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

ness of the subject expelled from it for the 
time being, and also those other cases in 
which local anaesthesia can be produced by 
mesmeric treatment, so that an arm, for ex- 
ample, may be made insensible to pain while 
the sensitive is fully awake, and able him- 
self to experiment on his condition by stick- 
ing pins into the insensitive flesh. In the 
case where the operation is carried out in its 
entirety, the nerve aura of the brain itself is 
dominated by that of the operator, and none 
of the senses are in any degree of activity. 
The true consciousness is then out of the 
body altogether, sometimes to an extent 
which makes it difficult for the subject to go 
through the slight muscular movement re- 
quired for articulate speech. In such cases 
it will be familiar to every mesmerist who 
has handled clairvoyant subjects that the 
thing to do is to demesmerize the lips, — that 
is to say, by a conscious effort of will asso- 
ciated with the attractive force of the fingers, 
to draw out the alien magnetism from that 
portion of the subject's organism; then the 
original nerve aura is restored to potential 
activity, and the subject is enabled to speak 
while still remaining in the trance condition. 
In the case of the local effect the nerve aura 



ANESTHETIC EFFECTS. 139 

is simply dominated in the limb under treat- 
ment; in the head and in the body generally 
the normal condition of the nervous system 
continues, and the patient is to all intents 
and purposes awake. 

The familiar mesmeric phenomenon in- 
volved in the transference of sense from the 
mesmerist to the sensitive is precisely in ac- 
cordance with this somewhat more elaborate 
explanation of anaesthesia and artificial cata- 
lepsy. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 

Many of the most familiar experiments in 
that kind of mesmerism which has latterly 
been played with rather as an amusement 
than seriously investigated, have to do with 
the transfer of sensations or states of con- 
sciousness from the operator to the subject 
under conditions that have nothing to do 
with the five senses. I do not propose to 
burden these pages with elaborate records of 
such experiments, with the names, dates and 
places concerned. Books devoted to such 
records teem with elaborate examples of the 
phenomenon before us. Any sense may be 
the nucleus, as it were, around which these 
transferred impressions can be gathered. A 
duly qualified mesmerized subject may be at 
one end of a room, the operator may look at 
the page of a book at the other end, and the 
mesmerized subject will be able to read the 
words as they pass across the operator's vis- 
ion. If he hears a faint sound, quite incapa- 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 141 

ble of making itself audible in the natural 
way to the sensitive, the sensitive in turn 
will hear that sound. If he receives a phy- 
sical sensation, like the prick of a needle, 
the sensitive in relation with him will start 
and show by some appropriate movement 
that the sensation was transferred to the cor- 
responding part of his or her body, and in 
exactly the same way phenomena of taste and 
smell can be, and have been scores of times, 
transferred from operator to subject. When 
we approach the consideration of these phe- 
nomena we find ourselves at once in a region 
of mesmeric practice altogether out of gear 
with those simple transactions having to do 
with curative processes, with which some 
people erroneously imagine that mesmeric 
science comes to an end. 

Of course such phenomena as I am now 
approaching are only possible in reference 
to persons whose susceptibility to mesmeric 
influence is very acute, and this may be the 
appropriate moment to enter more at length 
on the consideration of what really consti- 
tutes mesmeric sensitiveness. To analyze 
this with as much precision as that which 
might be applied to the treatment of a chem- 
ical compound would not be possible, unless 



142 THE BATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

we started with as full an appreciation of 
all the elements which go to make up the 
psychic nature of man as we possess in re- 
gard to the physical attributes of the elemen- 
tary bodies. Without claiming any greater 
admission than is surely involved in the view 
of humanity which most people entertain, we 
may recognize a human creature as at all 
events a composite entity to this extent, that 
he has a spiritual or psychic nature of some 
sort in union during life with his body. 
Furthermore, the fact that avenues of per- 
ception, having to do with the psychic na- 
ture, exist independently of the five senses, 
may almost be proved as a broad proposition 
by the experience of dreams, even before we 
approach those far more scientific proofs in- 
volved in mesmeric experiment. If any one 
at the present day endeavors to cling to the 
hypothesis that only through the channel of 
the five senses can states of consciousness be 
conveyed to the real ego of a human being, 
all we need say here is that so narrow and 
ignorant a view of the subject unfits an in- 
quirer for dealing with the Rationale of Mes- 
merism. He must first take the moderate 
pains by which he will be able to acquaint 
himself with notorious facts. 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 143 

But starting from the general principle 
that the psychic nature of man has its own 
appropriate channels of approach other than, 
or over and above, those that lead through 
the physical senses, we may recognize very 
quickly that the complicated phenomena of 
transferred sensations under mesmeric treat- 
ment fall into their places as varied expres- 
sions of one simple truth. The establish- 
ment of the mesmeric condition has set up 
magnetic relations between the auras of the 
two persons concerned, and the conditions 
of consciousness acquired by the operator 
through his own senses, and then by a nat- 
ural automatic process reflected in his own 
aura, are equally reflected in the aura of his 
subject, and thence directly transferred to 
those innermost centres of consciousness 
which the subject's senses are equally able 
to approach, and which, therefore, when ex- 
cited in his own nature, seem to him to have 
been excited in the ordinary way. 

Take for example the simple case to which 
I referred just now, of a mesmerist who so 
arranges things that a friend shall prick him 
with a needle in the arm or hands held be- 
hind his back, or in any way not seen by the 
sensitive, and in which the sensitive betrays 



144 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

immediate consciousness of the sensation. I 
have seen a sensitive under my own treat- 
ment move one hand hastily over the other 
as though brushing off an annoyance, when 
the back of my own corresponding hand be- 
hind my back has been pricked by a third 
person. Here we may conjecture that no- 
thing really transpires in that particular 
spot of the sensitive's person which seems to 
feel the sensation, but whatever may be the 
state of consciousness of the ego due to a 
prick in the back of the hand, that state of 
consciousness is superinduced, so to speak, 
by a short cut in the case of the transferred 
mesmeric sensation. Lodged in the inner- 
most consciousness it suggests the idea of 
having been occasioned in the usual way, 
and hence the impression that it is a prick 
in the back of the hand. Does the idea 
seem fantastic, or unsupported by adequate 
experience? The truth is that a precisely 
similar phenomenon has been utterly famil- 
iar from time immemorial, and every doctor 
at all events knows that people who have 
lost an arm or a leg will testify to the 
strange fact that they constantly seem to 
feel pain in the missing hands or feet. 
They seem to feel that pain because in some 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 145 

way the centre of consciousness has been 
affected in the same way that it would have 
been if the hands or feet had been present, 
and had suffered injury. The subject as- 
signs the sensation to its normal cause. 

Very well, then, we have, in considering 
what it is that constitutes sensitiveness to 
the order of phenomena now under consid- 
eration, to do with the psychic element in 
the human constitution, and the question 
turns entirely upon the extent to which that 
psychic constitution is predominant, or al- 
together absorbed in, and overwhelmed by, 
the physical nature. 

It will be understood that in the theory I 
am going to define I am expressing conclu- 
sions derived from the study of many other 
departments in human psychology besides 
those directly concerned with the explana- 
tions given. To put forward these explana- 
tions on what would be recognized as a sci- 
entific method, I ought to start from the 
basis of positively known facts, and build- 
ing up, with the help of definite experi- 
ments, fresh knowledge bit by bit, arrive at 
the results offered for acceptance. Nor is 
that scientific method to be found fault with 
in regard to the investigations of the deeper 



146 THE RATIONALE OF MESMEBISM. 

mysteries of man's constitution as a whole; 
but we can only derive a comprehension of 
the true theory of mesmeric results by first 
of all getting a conception of that constitu- 
tion as a whole, and then deriving from 
such aggregate knowledge whatever specific 
knowledge may be required to illuminate 
the problem in hand. And as this little 
volume does not profess to be a complete 
compendium of human psychology in all its 
bearings, it would be impossible to follow 
step by step the whole investigation which 
leads to that which I hold to be the correct 
view of the subject, the theosophical view, 
namely, of the psychic and spiritual attri- 
butes of humanity. That which I propose 
to offer in reference to the branch of the 
subject now coming forward for treatment 
— the theory of mesmeric sensitiveness — is 
a clear statement of theory deduced from 
theosophic teaching at large, and claiming 
attention, I think, at this crisis by all stu- 
dents of mesmerism as at all events coherent 
and rational, and subject in itself to exper- 
iments directed to test its validity in refer- 
ence to its most important elements. 

Sensitiveness, to begin with, must not be 
regarded as an absolute fact in any one's na- 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 147 

ture, like his height in inches or his weight 
in pounds. Sensitiveness and the comple- 
mentary characteristics which may be called 
mesmeric force, are subject to a practically 
infinite degree of variation in different 
persons, and the maximum degree of sen- 
sitiveness will feel the impact of the mini- 
mum degree of mesmeric force. In the 
same way the maximum degree of mesmeric 
force will enable the minimum degree of 
sensitiveness to cognize its influence, and 
between these two extremes the whole body 
of phenomena connected with mesmeric ex- 
periment are always moving up and down 
along a double sliding scale. There are no 
people living so densely involved in matter, 
whose intelligence, that is to say, has come 
to immerse itself so entirely in the physical 
brain, as to be utterly beyond the reach of 
mesmeric power in excel sis. Here let me 
point out that I am taking as the example 
of minimum sensitiveness a human being 
very far removed from the bottom of the 
scale of human evolution. The entangle- 
ment of thought here is only superficial, but 
may easily mislead those who have no clue 
to the proper comprehension of the problem. 
The bottom of the human scale for pur- 



148 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

poses of mesmeric sensitiveness is not to be 
found in the person of the dull-witted clod- 
hopper, without a conscious thought directed 
to any subject more elevated than bacon 
and furrows. It is quite possible that such 
a clodhopper, however incapable of adding 
two rows of figures together, might be 
highly sensitive to mesmeric influence, and 
it is equally true that the person who would 
represent the very highest degree of mes- 
meric influence imaginable must almost ne- 
cessarily be also highly gifted in every intel- 
lectual aspect. These statements fall into 
a truly scientific shape in the mind if we 
think of the three typical human beings 
thus imagined as ranged, not along a straight 
line, but along a cyclic curve. Our clod- 
hopper, for the purposes of this broad illus- 
tration, will represent the divine essence, 
let us say, coming into human form. As it 
accomplishes the cyclic process thus entered 
upon, it first of all evolves to the highest 
possible degree the physical aspect in which 
it is struggling to express itself, and at one 
point in the curve accomplishes the maxi- 
mum degree of development possible as re- 
gards the physical instrument with which it 
is working. The race (here, of course, we 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 149 

are speaking of the race as the continuous 
unity, and the single individuals as points in 
its progress) having accomplished its maxi- 
mum physical intellectual development con- 
tinues along the returning curve of the 
cycle, and without losing an atom, or an at- 
tribute, so to speak, of the advantage gained, 
proceeds to reevolve its so far hidden psychic 
attributes which express themselves in phy- 
sical intelligence at the nadir point of the 
cycle, and are afterwards destined to respir- 
itualize themselves, plus all the acquisitions 
due to the descent into matter. The centre 
of evolution which is being carried round 
the cycle of course does not return to that 
same point in the figure from which the cy- 
cle sprang, but to the corresponding point 
on a higher level. The further examination 
of that idea, however, would take us beyond 
the subject now specially before us. I shall 
have to return to the cyclic idea directly, 
but having for the moment broadly denned 
the origin, subsidence, and re-development 
of sensitiveness as a human attribute, let me 
show what the same methods of thought 
bring out in regard to the complementary 
characteristics of mesmeric force. 

I have called them complementary for con- 



150 THE RATIONALE OF MESMEEISM. 

venience' sake, but let us not for a moment 
imagine that one human being is exclusively 
a sensitive, another human being exclusively 
a mesmerist. The very maximum degree 
of mesmeric force is, on the contrary, ne- 
cessarily associated with the maximum de- 
gree of sensitiveness, because the maximum 
degree of either can only be due to the pos- 
session by the person in question of supreme 
knowledge concerning both aspects of his 
nature. Remember, sensitiveness does not 
necessarily mean liability to have the will 
enslaved by another. That is only one of 
the aspects of sensitiveness of one kind. 
We shall map all this out clearly in a little 
while, though at first the complications of 
the problem cannot but appear rather bewil- 
dering to those who are unfamiliar with this 
system of thinking. That which I mean in 
speaking of sensitiveness at this stage of the 
explanation is the faculty of cognizing im- 
pressions derived through the aura, and the 
corresponding senses belonging to that ele- 
ment of the human constitution which is 
allied with its aura. The cultivation of 
these senses and faculties, it will be seen on 
a moment's reflection, when allied with a 
clear comprehension of all they mean, is a 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 151 

power and not a weakness. To be percep- 
tive of the feeblest effort of will or desire 
thrown out by another human being under 
conditions involving the full comprehension 
of how that sensitiveness is brought into 
play, is equivalent to possessing a faculty 
by means of which the slightest impulse of 
thought or desire in any other person can be 
cognized or tested. 

It does not follow that the sensitive of the 
kind I am now describing must necessarily 
give way or submit to that thought or influ- 
ence, or to any thought or influence even of 
a very much more powerful kind. If the 
sensitiveness is of the supreme sort I speak 
of, it is supremely under the control of the 
being to whom it belongs, constituting in- 
deed a part, and a very important part, of 
his own power as a mesmerist ; for his sensi- 
tiveness would enable him to perceive exactly 
what he was doing, to regulate the impulses 
of his own magnetic emanations in such a 
way that they would go precisely to their 
mark instead of being wasted like those of 
the non-sensitive mesmerist, even granting 
him a good deal of force. In fact, the non- 
sensitive mesmerist works, so to speak, in 
the dark, and wishing to hit a mark before 



152 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

him, flings a great handful of missiles at it 
in the hope that one or other may hit. The 
mesmerist who is supremely sensitive, works 
as one seeing his mark in the light, and 
projects with accurate aim, and correspond- 
ingly small expenditure of energy, the single 
missile required to touch it. 

This reflection, once comprehended, will 
enable any one to see how exasperating it 
is to those who comprehend mesmerism in its 
spiritual and psychic aspects to hear the silly 
babble of the world about the supposed 
weak-mindedness of all who come under 
mesmeric influence. There is no more 
weak-mindedness necessarily involved in be- 
ing sensitive on the psychic plane than in 
being sensitive to the delicacies of musical 
expression. Some people who are otherwise 
very brainless may be very highly gifted as 
musicians, but on that account we need not 
assume brainlessness to be a necessary con- 
dition of a fine ear. And this illustration 
helps us to another which may be appropri- 
ately offered for the consideration of any 
one who boasts that his own strength of will 
is such as to render him absolutely unap- 
proachable by mesmeric influence. This 
boast would be precisely analogous to one 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 153 

a person quite unable to distinguish one tune 
from another might make, if he thought fit 
to plume himself proudly upon the fact that 
no one, not even Patti or Joachim, could 
produce sounds possessing the smallest as- 
pect of beauty to his senses. 

However, it is true that a considerable de- 
gree of mesmeric energy may reside in many 
human organisms which have not yet 
evolved the faculty — the high, exalted fac- 
ulty — of conscious sensitiveness. Like the 
other characteristic, it must be imagined as 
following the evolution of the human race 
round the inevitable cycle. But there is an 
important difference to be borne in mind 
when we are considering these two aspects 
of psychic perfection, the positive and the 
negative, or rather the active and the pas- 
sive. Sensitiveness, just because in the 
first or lower limb of the cycle it is unasso- 
ciated with intellectual development, is a 
purely passive faculty. The whole body of 
faculties to which it belongs has not been 
evolved to that point in which self-conscious - 
ness becomes its leading attribute. The 
distinction here, of course, is that conscious- 
ness alone, an attribute shared by humanity 
with the lower animals, does not bring with 



154 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

it the tendency to reflect concerning its own 
attributes. It is only the intellectual man 
who, pondering on the problems of his own 
being, and turning his observation inward, 
renders himself the subject of his own re- 
flections, and can be called self-conscious in 
the significance with which I here employ 
the phrase. 

Well, then, there cannot be mesmeric 
force until the point of self -consciousness is 
reached in humanity, and that point reach- 
ing its culmination in the highest degree of 
mere intellectual development, the point of 
such highest development may be conven- 
iently regarded as the starting point from 
which mesmeric power begins to show real 
energy. Here again let me qualify this 
broad statement of the case to guard against 
what seem contradictions in experience. 
Many of the most remarkable mesmerists 
have not been men quite on the intellectual 
level of some amongst purely materialistic 
giants in science or literature, but that is 
due to the fact that all growths in nature 
are gradual. As the race approaches the 
condition of its highest intellectual manifes- 
tation the other faculties belonging to that 
condition rise into activity, and in individual 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 155 

cases some of these, by special effort di- 
rected to that end, may be brought to per- 
fection in advance of others with which they 
are, properly speaking, bracketed. But I 
do venture to assert with positive conviction 
that the facts of nature must correspond to 
the broad assertion, that, granting the same 
conditions of full health, vitality, bodily 
vigor, and habits of life conducive to the de- 
velopment of magnetic energy, the man who 
besides these attributes possessed a highly 
developed intellect would be the more power- 
ful mesmerizer of the two. 

And now let us take our already evolved 
mesmerist who as yet is nothing else, that 
is to say, who as yet has not climbed the up- 
ward limb of the evolutionary cycle, and 
who has not yet developed the receptive 
psychic faculties of his own nature, and let 
us consider how his energy operates on the 
various classes of sensitiveness with which he 
may have to do. Let us begin with the 
sensitives of the lower order ; those in which 
the psychic attributes have not yet been en- 
tirely dissolved in matter, or, so to speak, 
translated into their highest material equiv- 
alent, and who are represented in most com- 
plete perfection by our typical clodhopper. 



156 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

The free aura of the clodhopper is the attri- 
bute on which I wish to focus the reader's 
attention. In using this phrase, "free 
aura r " I venture to borrow an analogy from 
chemistry, where we might speak of "free" 
acid left in a solution in excess of that re- 
quired to neutralize a basic salt. The whole 
aura, to put the matter that way, of the un- 
developed man has not yet been employed in 
neutralizing matter. It is hanging about, 
and may be spoken of as free, in the sense 
of being uncombined. On that free aura 
the mesmerist's influence readily finds a 
lodgment. The idea conveyed from his own 
mind to that of the subject does not present 
itself to the subject's mind as something 
coming from without. He has not yet 
learned to analyze his consciousness to the 
degree of being able to draw such distinc- 
tions. He simply finds an impulse of some 
kind arising in his own mind; he does not 
reason about it, or question it in any way, 
he simply acts upon it as he would act upon 
any other impulses spontaneously arising 
in his own mind, unless restrained by some 
countervailing consideration having to do 
with penalties of an easily comprehended na- 
ture which would equally serve to restrain 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 157 

the impulses of a horse or a dog. And even 
these are in abeyance when the question is 
of an impulse implanted by the mesmerist's 
will, because the very act of the mesmerist 
in taking charge of the subject's aura, has 
operated to suspend its normal activity as 
an influence directing the brain, and with 
the entrancement of the subject's lower 
nature an almost absolutely blank field of 
operations is left to the mesmerist, just 
because so far there is no higher nature 
consciously evolved in the person under 
treatment. 

Here we get the first broad idea interpret- 
ing the phenomena of mesmeric subjection 
in reference to which the hypnotists of the 
present day are so much interested, and so 
deeply anxious, if we may accept their as- 
surances to that effect. All these phenom- 
ena of hypnotic obedience carried to lengths 
which startle the observer are phenomena 
having to do with impressions left by the 
mesmerists concerned on the subject's aura. 
They may or may not spring immediately 
into activity. If the impression on the aura 
is that a certain delay shall be operative be- 
fore the message, so to speak, is passed on, 
that impression is obeyed like any other. 



I 1 



158 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

It is the unintellectual psychic nature 
which is obedient in such a case, the psychic 
nature which has not yet become self-con- 
scious ; which is so much abstract psychic or 
spiritual energy in process of translation 
into a self-conscious being, but for the time 
being unqualified to reason about the right 
or wrong of its impulses, simply because it 
has not yet been converted into reasoning 
faculty. 

And, be it observed, that in order to 
maintain the set of conditions we are now 
contemplating, it is not necessary that we 
should keep our mind fixed upon the ex- 
treme example thereof, — the case in which 
the human subject is as nearly unintelligent 
as we can imagine a human being to be. 
At a later stage of the process, though at 
one still on the earlier side of the meridian 
of our cycle, a great deal more of the 
psychic nature may be translated into intel- 
lectual capacity, and the person concerned 
may be very far from being a fool or an ig- 
noramus, and yet that which is still psychic 
in the nature may have undergone but a 
comparatively small amount of evolution. 
Let us always bear in mind the character of 
the cycle we are thinking of, and the grad- 



THE NATUBE OF SENSITIVENESS. 159 

ual nature of all the processes with which 
it is concerned. Education of that superior 
element in the total consciousness, which, 
for convenience of talking about it here, let 
us call the Higher Self — the education of 
the Higher Self may begin, it is true, long 
before the nadir point of physical evolution 
is reached, but on the other hand it may 
not, — or its evolution may only have just 
begun. It is the later period of the cyclic 
process to which the evolution of that 
Higher Self properly belongs; and thus, 
when a person still on the eastern side of 
life's meridian, — to use a pretty figure em- 
ployed lately by Dr. Huggins in application 
to a cycle smaller than that with which I am 
now dealing, but still analogous to it in 
nature, — a person, I say, still on the east- 
ern side of the meridian may have a very 
great degree of intellectual development, 
and yet a Higher Self barely capable of 
reasoning about the impressions it may re- 
ceive from external sources when deprived 
of the support of that physical intellect on 
which it has been leaning to a very great 
extent. 

If the brain instrument becomes paralyzed 
for the time being by any of the nervous influ- 



160 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

ences that may be exerted upon it by either 
mesmeric or hypnotic processes, the psychic 
nature may be almost as stupidly obedient 
to the mesmerist's impulse as if there had 
been no intellect in association with it at 
all. So then in the case of a hypnotic sug- 
gestion intended to operate at a period sub- 
sequent to the establishment of the impres- 
sion, such a person will find the impulse to 
do whatever he may have been directed to 
do rising up in his mind like a spontaneous 
desire, and certainly if there is no glaring 
reason why he should not do the thing, he 
will do it. Supposing that there is a glar- 
ing reason in morals or obvious duty why 
he should not obey the impulse, a conflict 
may arise in his nature, one issue of which 
quite possibly is a reversion to the paralyzed 
condition of the intellect which was opera- 
tive during the original mesmeric process, 
and then the immoral influence is worked 
out without any impediment. Or, there may 
be an interior convulsion in which the intel- 
lect asserts itself as predominant over the 
psychic impulse. And, again, it may be 
that the Higher Self, although very imper- 
fectly developed, has nevertheless reached a 
certain stage of its growth in which it is not 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 161 

entirely without the power of controlling its 
incarnate tendencies. 

But now let us suppose that the mesmerist 
is operating on some sensitive who belongs 
to the other half of the cycle of which we 
are speaking. Let us observe in passing 
that he will not obtain any effect whatever 
on the person who represents the nadir point 
of physical evolution. The perfectly intel- 
lectual materialist will not be subject, at all 
events, to any mesmeric influence of the 
kind of which we are now talking. He, 
too, in spite of his lofty self-conceit, would 
be as helpless as a straw in the wind if sub- 
ject to mesmeric influence belonging to the 
highest developments of humanity in the 
upper half of the cycle ; but we are dealing 
still with our mesmerist who is but begin- 
ning to be one, who belongs himself to the 
nadir point, that is to say, who is an ordi- 
nary person in the world, like the rest of us 
all around. When he begins to apply his 
influence to some one in whom sensitiveness 
is beginning in any appreciable way to de- 
velop itself in the shape of completely con- 
scious psychic existence, independent of, or 
over and above, that of the physical plane, 
he may attain many results which are su- 



162 THE BATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

perficially like those he has got at in the ear- 
lier undertaking. All transferred impres- 
sions of taste, sound, or touch will of course 
be as readily operative through the Higher 
Self of a human being in process of spiritual 
exaltation, as through the Higher Self, how- 
ever little capable of self-conscious thought, 
of the undeveloped human being. And 
when the task to be undertaken involves the 
employment of anything resembling clair- 
voyance — a branch of the subject which I 
reserve for special treatment presently — he 
will find the superior sensitive far more 
readily available for that lofty employment 
than the inferior, though the inferior is by 
no means incapable of clairvoyance within 
certain limits. 

At the outset there is an immense practi- 
cal difference between the sensitive who is 
such by reason of belonging to the upper 
limb of the cycle and the other. First of all 
it is very unlikely that the superior sensitive 
could be mesmerized by any ordinary mes- 
merist unless surrendering to that influence 
by a deliberate act of submission in the first 
instance. By the hypothesis the mesmeriz- 
able portion of the nature — if I may use 
that clumsy expression — is self-conscious in 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 163 

the case of the superior sensitive; therefore 
it cannot be caught in a helpless state like 
the other. If the superior sensitive were to 
put the matter in words, he might say to 
the mesmerist: "You may be able to hurt 
me through faculties that you can hit at, 
but you cannot control me. I can defend 
myself even though I may be bruised in the 
encounter." But supposing the sensitive 
has no motive for taking up such an atti- 
tude, but on the contrary is in sympathy 
with the mesmerist, and quite willingly ac- 
cepts through his psychic nature the guid- 
ance of the mesmerist, an external appear- 
ance of submissive obedience may arise, just 
as in the ordinary waking life one person 
may do what he is told through love, and 
another through fear. The nature of the 
obedience is quite different, though the ex- 
ternal aspect may be nearly the same. 

And here we come to the satisfactory as- 
pect of that phenomenon which looks so 
alarming to the merely empiric students of 
hypnotic suggestion. Where the Higher 
Self which receives the mesmeric impression 
is a self-conscious and developed entity, it 
will only obey as long as the currents of 
sympathy between itself and the mesmerist 



164 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

which originally disposed it to submission 
are maintained, and those currents will be 
violently disturbed, if not destroyed, should 
the mesmerist endeavor to impose an act on 
the subject which is repugnant or revolting 
to his own sense of right. I do not say 
that, even with a sensitive on the superior 
limb of the cycle, it would be theoretically 
inconceivable that a mesmerist might enforce 
obedience to an act to which the unfettered 
instincts of the subject would be opposed. 
If a voluntary submission, through currents 
of sympathy, have been given in the first in- 
stance, and if, through a very long and pro- 
tracted mesmeric relationship, the subject 
has for years been in the habit of acquies- 
cing in the impulses of the mesmerist, a 
habit of that sort might be very difficult to 
break, even if an extraordinary change took 
place in the nature and character of the mes- 
merist. But this is only translating to the 
higher plane (which, after all, is a region in 
which human relationships exist just as they 
do on this plane of being) of embarrassments 
which might equally ensue in the waking 
state. Take the case of a husband and 
wife, where the wife, to make the illustra- 
tion parallel, is quite the husband's equal in 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 165 

intelligence, but well disposed to play the 
feminine part in their relationship. If at a 
very early period of this relationship the hus- 
band suddenly shows unexpected impulses 
towards evil, and endeavors to conduct the 
wife along those paths, she would at once 
revolt; her own intelligence and sense of 
right would be in command of her actions. 
But, supposing that the husband through a 
long course of years acquires, by his mani- 
festations of character and by all the acts of 
his life, her perfect trust and confidence, so 
that her habit of submission to an influence 
that she always finds entitled to respect be- 
comes very deeply seated; in such a case, if 
we choose to suppose the husband suddenly 
developing proclivities to evil, it is not be- 
yond the possibilities of the strained suppo- 
sition that the wife would surrender to his 
example. The whole set of conditions is 
morally absurd ; they could not arise except 
in something like an access of insanity, 
which would again bring its own safeguards 
with it ; but just so do the obvious probabil- 
ities of the case provide us with an answer 
to the pet theory of persons who ignorantly 
object to the practice of mesmerism in re- 
gard to the possibility that the mesmerist 



166 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

might improperly control a sensitive of the 
higher order. In marriage as well as in 
mesmerism there are many possibilities of 
danger lurking, and the destiny which be- 
falls a woman who puts herself into the 
hands of a thoroughly bad husband may be 
deplorable to the last degree ; but that is the 
analogy which exactly meets all talk about 
mesmeric dangers. Nothing could be more 
idiotic than for a sensitive to subject himself 
to the continued influence of a mesmerist in 
whose character he had no adequate confi- 
dence, just as it would be equally idiotic for 
a girl to rush into matrimony with a man of 
whom she knew nothing; but the moral of 
that reflection is that we should be careful in 
choosing our mesmeric and our matrimonial 
partners, and not that the institution in either 
case is to be finally repudiated. Indeed, to 
put a stop to marriage altogether because of 
the examples which occasionally exhibit its 
dangers, would be less intellectually absurd 
than to adopt the same course in regard to 
mesmerism; for, after all, mesmerism is a 
very much more gradual process than the 
other, and there is no moment at which the 
fatal ring is slipped on to the finger of the 
Higher Self. Even experiments must be 



THE NATURE OF SENSITIVENESS. 167 

cautiously conducted, but you can be mes- 
merized a little and still draw back in time 
to avoid disaster. Social science has not 
yet evolved a corresponding safeguard for 
the marriage state. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CLAIRVOYANCE. 

We now approach that department of our 
subject but for which it might almost be re- 
garded as one belonging rather to medical 
practice than to the psychological inquirer. 

Perhaps this is the place where I may- 
most appropriately deal with the attempt, 
already made by some medical practitioners 
just beginning to dabble in experiments 
with mesmerism, to warn off all intruders 
on that domain and reserve it exclusively for 
themselves. That notion is one of the silli- 
est among many which arise from ignorance 
of what mesmerism really is, and the claim 
of the doctors to have mesmerism reserved 
by law for their own exclusive service is 
doubly ridiculous, because medical men as 
a body, in this country especially, exhibited 
a bigoted intolerance of the whole subject 
that was simply disgraceful until the growth 
of independent knowledge forced them to 
recognize some parts of the discovery as a 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 169 

natural truth, and have shown themselves 
by all they have done in the past as singu- 
larly unqualified to handle the more subtle 
investigations which the future progress of 
this great science will bring into play. We 
may do all honor to the few doctors who in 
the past, and the greater number who in the 
present, are identified with the therapeutic 
developments of Mesmer's discovery; but 
at the same time we must remember that for 
every single Dr. Esdaile or Dr. Elliotson 
there were scores of contemporary practi- 
tioners who brutally refused to allow their 
patients to enjoy the privileges which mes- 
merism held out to them, and when one of 
Dr. Elliotson 's leading cases was brought 
before the notice of the Medico-chirurgical 
Society that body distinguished itself by 
passing resolutions the shame of which it 
will have some difficulty in getting rid of. 
The case in question has already been 
slightly referred to in an earlier chapter. 
A surgeon, Mr. Ward, had cut off a man's 
leg at the hospital over which Dr. Elliotson 
presided, while the patient was under the 
influence of a mesmeric trance brought on 
by the treatment of Mr. Topham, a barris- 
ter, who was studying mesmerism at the 



170 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

time. Frightful as the operation was, the 
patient suffered it quite unconsciously, and 
was entirely spared the torture to which he 
would otherwise have been subjected. The 
assembled body of physicians and surgeons 
rose in revolt at this unheard of transaction 
when it was described in a paper brought 
before them by Mr. Ward. They passed 
resolutions denying the paper any place on 
the records of the Society, as something that 
was manifestly incredible and absurd, and 
linked themselves to the idiotic hypothesis 
that, if any truth resided in Mr. Ward's 
statement, the patient had probably been 
trained not to express outward symptoms of 
pain. They wound up by declaring that, 
even if such an absurdity could be realized, 
it would be flying in the face of Nature, 
which had ordained pain as a necessary con- 
comitant of surgical operations ! 

This is only a typical illustration of the 
spirit in which the medical profession gen- 
erally welcomed the advent of the new dis- 
covery, and the claim of that profession, 
now that the reality of the discovery has be- 
come too glaring for denial, to take it out 
of the hands of all such inquirers as those 
who have brought it to its present degree of 



CLAIBVOYANCE. 171 

perfection, and reserve it for their own use, 
is, to begin with, one of the most impudent 
that could be advanced. Doctors might as 
well have claimed at an earlier stage in the 
advance of science that because electricity- 
was susceptible of some therapeutic applica- 
tion*, it should be reserved by law for the 
use of medical men, no one being permitted 
to carry on electrical experiments, or to in- 
vestigate the nature of that force, unless he 
belonged to the faculty. We may imagine 
how far electrical science would have ad- 
vanced if that course had been adopted, and 
its adoption now in reference to mesmerism 
would interpose a barrier to the advancement 
of human knowledge, the monstrous charac- 
ter of which can only be appreciated by 
those who know something of the higher psy- 
chic or spiritual aspects of mesmerism, to 
which the attention of the reader will now 
be directed. 

In the current manuals of the day which 
deal with hypnotism very little is said about 
its psychic aspects. The new departure 
has been taken as far as possible with the 
view of keeping it in harmony with the lim- 
ited series of facts brought to light by recent 
medical experiments that have captivated 



172 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

popular interest. But it must not be sup- 
posed that the real literature of mesmerism, 
which altogether lies behind this modern se- 
ries of relatively narrow and departmental 
treatises, is deficient in the evidence required 
to establish the reality of clairvoyance, both 
as regards space and time, as a fact in na- 
ture. 

Deleuze has dealt with this branch of the 
subject in a special memoir of very remark- 
able interest, entitled "Memoire sur la Fac- 
ulte de Prevision," published in 1836 in 
Paris. Nothing in the more recent litera- 
ture of the subject exhibits clearer common- 
sense as applied to the investigation of the 
delicate phenomena with which he is con- 
cerned. He is not tainted with the foolish- 
ness which has so beset more recent writers, 
of disregarding all work in this department 
done in the past. On the contrary, he 
points out now that, since the faculties of 
man are the subject of the inquiry before 
him, those faculties, whatever they are, were 
the same two thousand years ago as at the 
present day. The progress of physical 
science has given the modern world an im- 
mense advantage in dealing with inquiries 
of a purely physical character, and such in- 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 173 

quiries as carried on by ancient writers are 
now of little value. But the very fact that 
the attention of ancient philosophers was not 
distracted by so many departments of physi- 
cal inquiry rendered them the better, rather 
than the less, able to arrive at a just appre- 
ciation of those human attributes on which 
their attention was fixed, and within the 
period which was recent when M. Deleuze 
wrote, the phenomena of magnetic "som- 
nambulism " — to use the expression adopted 
by the earlier French writers to describe 
what we now generally call "clairvoyance" 
— had been under observation for about fifty 
years. Cases of prevision were recorded in 
the medical journals, and he says: "Open 
the 'Memoirs of the Society of Strasburg,' 
and the 'Bibliotheque du Magnetisme,' and 
the accounts of medical experience connected 
with somnambulism published in Germany, 
Russia, and Holland, and you will find the 
same class of facts ; and the concurrence in 
this way of a crowd of people attesting facts 
of the same order which each of them has 
observed separately, constitutes proof to 
which there is no reply. It is impossible 
that men of all countries, without relations 
with one another, who do not even adopt the 



174 THE BATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

same theories, and amongst whom we find 
many physicians, should be in a conspiracy 
to attest falsehoods." 

I select a few other passages from the 
essay as it proceeds : — 

"Most metaphysicians reason as if there 
existed nothing in the world but that of 
which our five senses demonstrated the exis- 
tence. They admit only two orders of 
things, sensible objects and the consciousness 
which receives the sensations. They forget 
that we perceive merely those objects which 
affect our senses, and that there may exist 
an infinity of objects unknown to these, and 
to which our organs are inaccessible. The 
faculty of comprehending the form of an ob- 
ject at a distance would be inconceivable to 
one born blind but for the testimony of oth- 
ers. If we had one sense the more, our con- 
sciousness would be modified accordingly; 
... let us then imitate the blind; let us 
assure ourselves of the reality of phenomena 
by the results, observing the somnambule as 
the blind observe us." 

"It is impossible, sometimes people say, 
to see the future, for the future does not ex- 
ist. The present only has real existence; 
but, if the past has an existence relatively 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 175 

to ourselves, that is merely because it has 
left its traces. It exists by its effects; the 
future exists by its germ. The past has pro- 
duced the present, it was its cause ; the fu- 
ture will be produced by the present, it will 
be its effect. When we consider the past 
we behold the cause in its effects; when we 
consider the future we see the effects in the 
cause." 

"When a brilliant light illuminates the 
landscape we may admire its richness, but 
we do not see the stars which decorate the 
celestial vault. The rays they send from 
that incalculable distance reach our eyes in 
the day as well as in the night. Our inter- 
nal faculty even exists the whole time, but 
it is only in the silence of other sensations 
that our souls discern the innumerable rays." 

This essay was written with the intention 
that it should form an introduction to a 
great collection of cases illustrative of clair- 
voyant prevision. Deleuze had been a pro- 
lific writer before he penned the present 
memoir on the general subject of mesmer- 
ism, but he says that he specially reserved 
this profoundly interesting department for 
treatment by itself. He was not left at his 
work, however, long enough to complete this 



176 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

undertaking. The memoir itself was the 
last of his writings, and it was published 
after his death by a friend who had endeav- 
ored, as far as he was able, to realize the 
original idea of supplying the accumulation 
of cases. Some of these are interesting and 
worth attention, but to translate them here 
at full length would involve an expansion of 
this little volume beyond the limits I con- 
template. I will be content with briefly 
epitomizing one illustration which Deleuze 
himself arranged to give, and of which he 
seems himself to have obtained various 
attestations. This is the famous case of 
Cazotte's prophecy concerning the French 
Revolution, often vaguely referred to, but 
perhaps unfamiliar in its details to many 
of my readers. 

The prediction is recorded by La Harpe 
in his collected works, published in 1806. 
He describes himself as having been present, 
at the commencement of the year 1788, at a 
dinner party given by one of his confreres 
of the Academy to a distinguished company, 
including people of the Court, of legal and 
literary distinction, and many Academicians. 
The conversation during the evening ran on 
the lines of Voltairean infidelity and atheism, 



CLAIRVOYANCE. Ill 

then coming so widely into fashion. The 
party was convulsed with delight at one an- 
ecdote told by a guest, whose hair-dresser 
had said to him, "Look you, sir, though I 
am but a miserable carabin, I have no more 
religion than anybody else." The only 
person who had not taken part in all these 
pleasantries was Cazotte, an amiable and 
original man, says La Harpe, but unfortu- 
nately infatuated with the reveries of the 
mystic. At last he spoke more seriously 
than the others. 

"Gentlemen," said he, "be satisfied; you 
will see this grand and sublime revolution 
which you desire so much." 

"No need to be a great sorcerer to foresee 
that," replied some. 

" True, but perhaps it is necessary to be 
something of one to see the rest I have to 
tell you, namely, what will happen during 
this revolution." 

Count D'Orsay said, with a sarcastic 
laugh, that a philosopher need not be an- 
noyed at encountering a prophet. 

"You, Count D'Orsay," said Cazotte, 
"will expire on the pavement of a dungeon. 
You will die of poison which you will have 
taken to escape the executioner — poison 



178 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

which the happiness of that epoch will 
oblige you to carry always about you." 

Some sensation followed, and Cazotte was 
rebuked for giving them a story less amus- 
ing than his "Diable Amoureux." 

"But what has all that in common with 
philosophy and the Reign of Reason? " 

"It is precisely in the name of philosophy 
and liberty, and under the Reign of Reason 
and its temples, that these things will hap- 
pen." 

"Ma foil " said Chamfort; "you will not 
be one of the priests of those temples." 

"But you, M. de Chamfort, will be one, 
and you will open your veins with twenty- 
two cuts with a razor, and nevertheless you 
will not die until some months afterwards. 
You, M. Vicq d'Azir, will not open your 
veins ; you will have them opened six times 
in one day, during an access of gout, and 
you will die in the night. You, M. de Ni- 
colai, you will die upon the scaffold. You, 
M. Bailly, will die on the scaffold; you, 
M. de Malesherbes, on the scaffold*" 

So far the ladies had taken no part in this 
prophecy, and the Duchesse de Gramont 
was laughingly congratulating herself that 
evidently she would be protected by her sex. 



CLAIR VO YANCE. 179 

" Your sex, ladies, will not secure you this 
time. You will be treated like the men, 
without any difference. You, madame la 
duchesse, you will be conducted to the scaf- 
fold, you and many others with you in the 
charrette of the executioner, the hands tied 
behind the back." 

The conversation still maintained an air 
of ridicule, and Madame de Gramont said 
something about hoping she would at least 
be allowed to see a confessor. 

"No, madame," said Cazotte, "you will 
not have one, neither you nor any one. The 
last victim who will have one through grace, 
will be " — He hesitated a little while. 

"Well, who is the happy mortal who is 
to receive this prerogative? " 

"It will be the King of France." 

At this appalling blasphemy the party 
seems to have broken up, thinking Cazotte 's 
extravagance had been carried to dangerous 
lengths. 

At first, says Deleuze, he regarded all this 
as fiction by La Harpe, but he set himself 
to work to get information and changed his 
opinion. He obtained a letter from the 
Comtesse de Genlis, who writes, "I have 
heard him (de La Harpe) state this story a 



180 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

hundred times before the Revolution, and al- 
ways in exactly the same way that I have 
everywhere seen it printed." M. Deleuze 
then found out the son of M. Cazotte, who 
declared that his father had always been 
gifted with the faculty of prevision in the 
highest degree, and had given numerous 
proofs of it. Without being able to guar- 
antee the exact language used by La Harpe 
in his narrative, the son had no doubt 
whatever about its general truthfulness. 
A friend of M. Vicq d'Azir, inhabiting 
Rennes, bore testimony that this celebrated 
doctor had told the story of Cazotte 's pro- 
phecy, in his presence, several times before 
the Revolution took place. Finally, M. 
Deleuze appends a letter by the Baron de 
Langon, in which he says, "I can assure 
you on my honor that I have heard Madame 
la Comtesse de Beauharnais repeat that she 
had been present on this historic occasion. 
She always told her story in the same way, 
and her testimony corroborates that of La 
Harpe." 

A French writer, whose testimony on all 
subjects connected with clairvoyance is ex- 
tremely important, — M, A. Teste, a doctor 
of Paris, — wrote in 1843 an interesting vol- 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 181 

ume called "Manuel pratique de Magne- 
tisme Animal," in which he records a multi- 
tude of experiences coming under his own 
observation. The sensitives with whom he 
worked, — chiefly those who were at the 
same time sensitives and patients, — foretold 
with exactitude the course and conclusion of 
their various maladies. One of the most in- 
teresting records has to do with the case of 
a lady referred to as Madame Hortense, the 
subject of a long illness for which M. Teste 
treated her, and during which he constantly 
mesmerized her in the presence of her hus- 
band, who was himself deeply interested in 
the whole study. Many days before the 
special event referred to, she told them that 
at half past three on a certain day she would 
have a fright that would cause her to fall 
and sustain some serious internal complica- 
tions. They were aghast at this intelli- 
gence, and conceived that their care could 
not but ward off a danger so definitely pre- 
dicted. Of course, the sensitive herself 
never retained the smallest recollection in 
her waking state of her own prophecies, and 
they told her nothing of this threatened 
disaster. Questioning her about it in her 
clairvoyant state, she maintained always that 



182 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

they would not be able to ward it off, but 
that they need not be greatly concerned ; she 
would certainly undergo a great deal of suf- 
fering and protracted illness, but would not 
die, and would ultimately completely re- 
cover. Still, they resolved to do their very 
utmost to resist the threatened danger; and 
both doctor and husband hovered round the 
patient — not ill enough to be in bed — the 
whole of that afternoon. 

Well, I find it embarrassing to tell the 
story with the simple, straightforward candor 
of the French writer, because English ears 
are so singularly sensitive to details that 
seem to infringe decorum; but at the ap- 
pointed time the lady insisted on a little 
privacy, during which a rat suddenly ran 
across her, frightening her in so unexpected 
a way that she fell down and suffered exactly 
the consequences which she had foretold, 
happily with the ulterior recovery. This is 
only one of a cloud of cases with which M. 
Teste deals, and I must leave those readers 
who wish to get personal touch with the 
multiplied proofs he has accumulated to 
search his writings for themselves. 

A little thought will show that one essen- 
tial difference between the phenomena of 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 183 

clairvoyance and those coming into notice 
under other departments of mesmerism has 
to do with the essentially psychic character 
of the clairvoyant achievement. Everything 
belonging to the region of so-called hypnotic 
suggestion, however mysterious, may theo- 
retically be accounted for by hypotheses 
which leave the sensitive a highly organized 
being, no doubt, but not necessarily one in 
which the psychic attributes must be consid- 
ered as something independent of the bodily 
organism. And this reflection gives its real 
importance to the inquiry into the possibil- 
ities of clairvoyance. It is easy to miss the 
real significance of a new discovery, and to 
attach importance to the immediate practi- 
cal outcome thereof, instead of to the light 
thrown by the practical results on hidden 
and previously obscure laws of nature. It 
is preeminently easy to make this mistake 
in dealing with the psychic characteristics 
of those mesmeric sensitives in whom clair- 
voyance is exhibited. We may take the 
thing in itself, a marvelous and enchanting 
gift, and say that for its own sake it is worth 
while to see if we cannot cultivate to a 
higher degree of perfection a power so filled 
with attractive interest. Any one who, by 



184 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

passing into a magnetic trance, is thereby- 
enabled to cognize events that are going on 
at a distance, is clearly in possession of a 
gift which cannot but be recognized as pre- 
cious in itself. But when we begin to collate 
the various manifestations of this power, and 
to realize that no theory of latent senses at- 
taining an unusual degree of delicacy and 
perfection in the sensitive will account for 
what takes place, we begin to perceive that 
the study of this power, in the rare cases 
where it is exhibited, may be a pathway 
opening up before us possibilities of acquir- 
ing real scientific knowledge concerning 
those spiritual, or at all events superphysi- 
cal, elements in a human being which, hith- 
erto left as the subject of vague religious 
faith, have never yet been regarded by the 
world at large as liable to come within the 
domain of exact knowledge. 

Before going further, let me endeavor to 
group the various kinds of power or faculty 
exhibited by those whom I comprehensively 
describe as clairvoyants. First, we have to 
deal with that kind of clairvoyance which 
simply enables the sensitive to discern what 
is going on at some other place in the world. 
Sometimes the discernment extends for a 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 185 

little distance only, sometimes it ranges half 
across the globe ; but mere distance does not 
affect the nature of the faculty brought into 
activity. This kind of clairvoyance let me 
call "clairvoyance in space." Then we 
have to do with an extraordinary capacity, 
which has been shown, as Deleuze points out, 
so often as to make denial of the facts alto- 
gether silly, but in regard to which the dif- 
ficulties as to giving explanation are very 
overwhelming. I refer to what Deleuze 
calls "prevision," that which in the popular 
idioms of our own country is known as " sec- 
ond sight," and that which for the purpose 
of this classification we may call "clairvoy- 
ance in time." There is a third depart- 
ment of the faculty with which we are deal- 
ing, in which the sensitive is enabled to take 
note of phenomena in nature, whether near 
him or far off, which do not belong to the 
order of those phenomena perceptible to the 
senses; that is to say, the clairvoyant may 
see and converse with entities of some kind 
which the ordinary, waking person does not 
see at all, and cannot put himself into rela- 
tions with by any means in his power. 
Following the example of earlier writers, 
who certainly knew a good deal about the 



186 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

realms of nature thus brought within our 
purview, let us call this sort of sight " astral 
clairvoyance." 

There is yet a fourth sort of clairvoyance, 
which, from the point of view of people un- 
familiar with such phenomena as we are 
dealing with, could hardly be distinguished, 
perhaps, from the last, but which I feel my- 
self bound to treat separately here, because 
those who are students of anything really de- 
serving to be called psychological science 
will conceive "astral clairvoyance" as hav- 
ing a limited and specific meaning. As 
something no less distinct really from astral 
clairvoyance, in the ascending scale of na- 
ture's refinements, than that itself is different 
from the phenomena of the physical senses, 
we must recognize what I will venture to call 
"spiritual clairvoyance " as a possibility of 
this wonderful attribute, but it will be more 
convenient to put off further explanations on 
this head till I reach the fourth order in due 
progress of time. 

Again I say I am not engaged in this vol- 
ume in recapitulating the enormously volu- 
minous evidence on which our present know- 
ledge concerning all these subjects, in a great 
measure, rests ; but I will venture a passing 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 187 

word of warning to any one who may think 
I am classifying fictions instead of facts. 
To stop here and challenge the fundamental 
bases on which my present interpretations 
rest, will merely serve to rank incredulous 
persons who do this with the bigoted doctors 
who in the beginning scoffed angrily at rec- 
ords having to do with the simpler aspects 
of curative mesmerism, of which no person 
acquainted with the experiences of the pres- 
ent day would be inclined to dispute the 
authenticity. 

In regard to all three varieties of clairvoy- 
ance we shall arrive soonest at something re- 
sembling an intelligent appreciation of their 
rationale by assuming, at all events as a trial 
hypothesis, that they all have to do with that 
psychic side of the nature which, in analyz- 
ing the peculiarities of sensitiveness, I have 
already discussed pretty fully. What are 
we to infer as probably taking place when 
a sensitive sitting entranced in London be- 
comes cognizant of some transaction going 
on in Paris? It must be one of two things. 
Either the transaction throws off emana- 
tions or vibrations of some kind or another 
into some medium pervading all space, just 
as the luminous bodies throw off vibrations 



188 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

into the ether, and where these strike the 
perceptions or finer senses of persons no 
matter at what distance, they give rise to 
corresponding impressions, just as the rays 
emanating from a star affect the vision of 
those endowed with vision, no matter at 
what stupendous distances. And there is no 
essential and inherent absurdity in such a 
hypothesis, any more than in the actual facts 
having to do with the transmission of light. 
It might be alleged that transactions going 
on in the world are too numerous for each 
one to convey its own distinct impression, 
jostled as it must be by contact with incal- 
culable millions of other such impressions 
hastening in all directions across its path. 
Impossible as it may be for us to compre- 
hend the resources of nature by which such 
entanglements are averted, the vibrations of 
the luminiferous ether show, without going 
further, that nature is not embarrassed in 
dealing with such a problem. Take the act- 
ual facts of the simplest illustration that can 
be adopted; a group of people in a room. 
From every point in the walls and ceiling of 
the room, as from every point on the sur- 
face of every particle of furniture it may 
contain, complete spheres of radiation are 



CLAIR VO YANCE. 189 

flowing in all directions, as is necessarily 
proved by the fact that anybody can see 
each object from whatever point of view he 
stands, and yet every one of those absolutely 
innumerable spheres of luminous vibration 
sends its waves across another's path with- 
out interfering with the accuracy of each 
series. It would not be an intellectually 
extravagant hypothesis to assume that there 
are conditions in nature under the operation 
of which everything on earth, and every 
process and action going on is perceptible to 
appropriate senses from every other position 
on earth that can be imagined. I do not 
say that this is the case ; but merely to pave 
the way for subtle hypotheses which must be 
applied to any attempts to investigate such 
a profound mystery as clairvoyance, it is 
well to train the mind to appreciate the way 
in which no hypothesis must be rejected 
merely because of its complexity, if it har- 
monizes with the facts. 

The other alternative hypothesis in regard 
to our simple case of clairvoyance as between 
London and Paris would be that something 
material in the highest sense of the word, — 
not physical as belonging to the orders of 
matter perceptible to the five senses, ■ — but 



190 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

something material, appertaining probably 
to the psychic nature of the sensitive, is pro- 
jected under the operation of a current of 
thought or influence from the mesmerist or 
from the sensitive, assuming that to be 
awakened in some way by suggestion to him, 
from the place in which he is seated to the 
distant scene he is required to observe. 
Now that something which is projected may 
be either some portion of the psychic aura 
in which for the time being the real ego or 
spiritual consciousness of the person con- 
cerned may be seated, just as it is seated in 
the body during the activity of the body ; or 
it is theoretically conceivable that the true 
ego, without quitting the physical organism 
altogether, may project in the direction to 
be observed some current of magnetic influ- 
ence setting up a channel — if that expres- 
sion will help to pass the idea from my mind 
to my reader — through the all-pervading 
medium, whatever it is, the luminiferous 
ether, or something finer still, which is the 
suitable medium in nature for the vibrations 
which convey impressions to the psychic 
organism. 

Thus we have three hypotheses, either of 
which would fit in with the facts as far as it 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 191 

goes, and I may say at once that I regard 
all three hypotheses as dimly shadowing 
forth before our minds real actualities in 
nature, although when the inquiries on 
which it seems reasonable to hope this gen- 
eration is now entering are pushed a good 
deal further than they have generally gone 
as yet, we shall be able to understand these 
with very much greater precision than at 
present. But how does it come to pass that 
some persons subject to mesmeric influence 
are found to be clairvoyant and some inca- 
pable of exhibiting this quality, even in the 
least degree? We need go no further in 
search of an explanation than to the theory 
of sensitiveness I have already endeavored 
to lay down. The least developed psychic 
nature may be susceptible to impressions 
directly translated to itself from the aura of 
the mesmerist with which it has become 
blended, but if it is not developed on its own 
account into anything resembling a psychic 
consciousness, it will not be able to exert it- 
self with an intelligent end in view at the 
bidding of the mesmerist. In other words, 
we shall never find our fine clairvoyants 
among people who are on what I have pre- 
viously described as the lower limb, or east- 



192 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

era half, of the evolutionary cycle. It is 
only when a human being is sufficiently ad- 
vanced in the scale of nature to have passed 
the point of full immersion in matter — at 
which his psychic nature may have expressed 
itself to the utmost of its capacity in the 
form of physical intellect — that the second 
process begins, ultimately evolving him, as 
he passes through the ordeal of material in- 
carnation, into that relatively superior con- 
dition in which the psychic nature may truly 
be spoken of as the higher self. 

I am slightly embarrassed at this stage of 
my exposition by the impossibility of setting 
forth any really scientific theory of mesmer- 
ism in its higher branches without drawing 
largely at every turn on the resources of oc- 
cult science in its relation with the finer con- 
stitution of man. To go fully here into all 
the considerations which fortify the theories 
of occult science in their turn, would be to 
convert this volume into a repetition of oth- 
ers which have gone before, but just as I 
leave the reader to fill up his mind, if he 
wishes to do so, with details of mesmeric ex- 
periments from other books, merely working 
here with their significance and theoretical 
value, so I must refrain from any attempt 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 193 

to vindicate on their own account the under- 
lying principles of occult science concerning 
the constitution of man to which I may be 
bound occasionally to refer. Hitherto no 
writers on mesmerism have attempted any 
connected theory at all in regard to its 
higher manifestations, for want of the clue 
with which occult science now furnishes us ; 
and at least I may appeal to readers who may 
be handling this volume without any special 
preparation, to the coherence of the whole 
body of theory I am now putting forward, as 
involving a prima facie reason for looking 
favorably on the teaching from which these 
theories are derived. 

Clairvoyance, then, in any of its higher 
aspects should be regarded as a faculty of 
the higher self. The qualification I put in 
here is required to guard me from being sup- 
posed to mean that such clairvoyance as is 
involved in reading the time on a watch that 
has not been opened, or the words in a closed 
book, is a faculty of the higher self. That 
does not deserve to be called clairvoyance at 
all. It is an exercise of certain generally 
undeveloped senses stimulated to an abnor- 
mal degree of energy under the mesmeric 
process, but where distances have to be dealt 



194 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

with which extend beyond the aura of the 
sensitive, some degree of intelligence in his 
own psychic envelope — if I may use that 
expression — must be assumed. By this 
phrase I mean to suggest the idea that, 
whereas in the undeveloped man the psychic 
nature is, so to speak, chaotic and unformed 
— unorganized in the most complete sense of 
the term — in the other case the man who 
has passed the nadir point of material devel- 
opment begins then to grow a psychic organ- 
ism which may be thought of for the pur- 
poses of our present explanation as a finer 
kind of body to which his consciousness may 
be transferred under suitable conditions, 
and in which his mind can function as truly 
as in the waking state it functions in his 
physical body. The theory will not be com- 
pletely intelligible without keeping hold of 
the fundamental occult principle of reincar- 
nation, because without understanding that, 
all this talk on which I have ventured about 
people being before or behind the nadir point 
of material development would have very 
little meaning. But without attempting a 
complete exposition of the occult theory of 
reincarnation with all the collateral consid- 
erations which render it one of the most 



CLAIB VO YANCE. 195 

vital truths of nature for every one con- 
cerned with the study of esoteric teaching, 
it will be enough to make my present theo- 
ries intelligible if I say that according to 
the esoteric view every human being passes 
through a protracted series of physical lives 
with long intervening periods of spiritual 
experience, and that these successively rep- 
resent the stages of growth in nature to 
which each individual has attained, and in- 
volve a regular cosmic progress which may 
be greatly hastened by abnormal efforts, and 
may be seriously impeded by misapplica- 
tions of energy. 

How is the activity of the higher self, of 
which the clairvoyant sensitive under ordi- 
nary conditions of life may be, perhaps, 
hardly conscious, to be set up? To answer 
this question I must attempt a little more 
fully to explain what students of occultism 
mean by the higher self. I have referred 
already to reincarnation as the method by 
means of which nature accomplishes the evo- 
lution of each individual monad. Between 
each of the physical births the true being or 
ego in question remains in the enjoyment of 
that degree of spiritual evolution represented 
by the sum total of all the efforts made, up 



196 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

to that time, in the successive lives through 
which he has passed. Crude and popular 
conceptions on the subject of spiritual life 
entertain the idea that directly death occurs, 
the soul or spirit is set free, suddenly spring- 
ing into a condition of angelic exaltation in 
which higher perceptions and higher know- 
ledge come into play. Occult science does 
not recognize any proceeding so causeless in 
its character. That which is set free at death 
is the real ego at its then stage of evolution, 
and as I have already indicated, with human 
beings very little advanced along the cycle 
of evolution the nature of the spiritual con- 
sciousness is extremely torpid and unde- 
fined. That is merely another way of say- 
ing that, even in the realms of its higher 
activity, nature produces her achievements 
gradually. The gradual growth of the real 
spiritual ego, or higher self, is the great pur- 
pose in view throughout the whole under- 
taking of the successive lives. As already 
explained, after the neutral point of evolu- 
tion — the perfect infusion of spirit in mat- 
ter — is passed, the spiritual life begins to 
assert itself with renewed energy. The 
consciousness of the ego on spiritual planes 
then becomes a self - consciousness, and is 



CLAIM VO YANCE. 197 

associated with the power of independent 
action. 

Now, in the ordinary waking state the 
Higher Ego is to a great extent engaged 
with, and entangled with the physical plane. 
It largely inspires the mental and moral ac- 
tivity of the incarnate being, and although 
even during the waking state it may have 
some subtle relations with the spiritual 
plane, to which we need not at this moment 
pay attention, it is, to all intents and pur- 
poses, functioning on the plane of matter. 
But whenever the activity of the bodily or- 
ganism is suspended, the ego is set free to 
function on the other planes where it has al- 
ready established a right of entree. Even 
during ordinary sleep that passage from one 
plane to another takes place, at all events 
whenever the sleep is healthy and profound. 
The experiences which the Higher Ego goes 
through on the spiritual plane in such cases 
are by no means always transferred to the 
physical memory on waking; on the con- 
trary, such transfer is the exception and not 
the rule. A great branch of metaphysical 
study has been directed to the correct ap- 
prehension of this dual consciousness, of 
which every highly developed being is an ex- 



198 THE RATIONALE OF MESMEBISM. 

ample, and the most important work on the 
subject to which the reader can be referred 
is du Prel's " Philosophic der Mystik," 
admirably translated into English by Mr. 
C. C. Massey, and called by him "The 
Philosophy of Mysticism." Du Prel shows 
that by a careful analysis of the experiences 
and facts within our reach it is demonstrable 
that the waking brain does not "contain," 
in the metaphysical sense, the whole of the 
consciousness of the human being function- 
ing through that brain. More than this, 
the threshold of psychic consciousness — to 
use du Prel's expression — is constantly 
subject to advance or recession, and the 
process of pushing back that threshold so 
that as much as possible of the higher con- 
sciousness may be embraced within the area 
of physical brain recollection, constitutes 
the process which might in some of its bear- 
ings be described as the evolution of psychic 
faculties. 

Now, this explanation fully apprehended 
will afford, almost without further words, a 
clue to the comprehension of what really 
takes place under mesmeric influence in con- 
nection with the higher clairvoyance. The 
physical body is entranced by the magnetic 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 199 

influence, and the Higher Ego is set free. 
It follows the natural bent of its own affin- 
ities, and in so being set free passes at once 
into the spiritual aspect of its consciousness 
(occultists will understand that I am here 
using the term "spiritual" as embracing the 
astral plane), but in so far as this partial 
freedom does not involve the complete sever- 
ance between the physical brain and the finer 
astral organism, the latter continues in di- 
rect relation with the physical body by mag- 
netic threads or ligatures — one is obliged to 
use materialistic phrases in endeavoring to 
put such thoughts into words — and thus is 
accessible to stimuli which act in the first 
instance only on the physical organism, or 
let us rather say on the astral aura of the 
physical organism. Free as it is, the higher 
self is thus in continued intellectual rela- 
tions with the mesmerist whose magnetic in- 
fluence has sufficed to entrance the body, 
and to set its own activities at large. And 
the plane of such activities which it has now 
reached is entirely exempt from the re- 
strictions that embarrass activity on the phy- 
sical plane. Thought, will, or desire be- 
come the agents of something which we may 
think of as movement about the world, and 



200 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

the Higher Ego can be translated to any- 
distant place, or almost to any distant point 
in space, with as much facility as a thought 
may be turned towards some distant region 
with which the thinker is familiar. 

Just, however, as it is only to a place 
with which he is familiar that any one can 
turn his thoughts with precision, so as to re- 
call images of what he has seen, so it is only 
to some place with which the Higher Ego is 
in some kind of magnetic relation that its 
attention and perceptive powers can be 
turned. Thus we find that while a clairvoy- 
ant, however gifted, would be almost hope- 
lessly embarrassed if asked to discover in 
some distant part of the world a person 
unknown to his waking self, and equally 
unknown to the mesmerist, it would be 
perfectly easy for such a higher self to dis- 
cover the person to whom some specific 
article, handed to his body and thus brought 
into magnetic relations with his own aura, 
originally belonged. The clue to the accu- 
rate scientific comprehension of all the phe- 
nomena of mesmeric clairvoyance, having to 
do with what is called rapport, is thus read- 
ily afforded. If you have a lock of hair cut 
from some person's head, and put it into 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 201 

the hands of the sleeping clairvoyant, the 
magnetic vibrations connecting that with its 
original owner serve as a thread to guide 
the emancipated ego to the goal. And the 
truth is that what has now been said, simple 
as it is, constitutes the whole explanation of 
those phenomena belonging to the order of 
"clairvoyance in space." You will never 
get such clairvoyance out of a person whose 
spiritual evolution is inferior to the neutral 
point, and whose higher self has not been 
evolved to any degree of self -consciousness. 
Such a person may, as already explained, be 
highly susceptible of mesmeric influence, 
may respond with the most completely auto- 
matic docility to all the so-called sugges- 
tions of hypnotism, may be obedient to 
quite a terrible extent to the commands im- 
posed upon him by a mesmerist, but will 
never be able to accomplish achievements 
beyond the range of his own nature. 

I am not going to attempt an explanation 
which shall as completely cover the phenom- 
enon of "clairvoyance in time." The mys- 
teries of prevision are extremely bewildering, 
and on them we can only throw such specu- 
lative light as may be afforded, for example, 
by theories of metaphysics like those sug- 



202 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

gested by Dr. Oliver Lodge in his remark- 
able address at the Cardiff Meeting of the 
British Association. He says : — 

" A luminous and helpful idea is that time 
is but a relative mode of regarding things ; 
we progress through phenomena at a certain 
definite pace, and this subjective advance 
we interpret in an objective manner, as if 
events necessarily happened in this order 
and at this precise rate. But that may be 
only one mode of regarding them. The 
events may be in some sense in existence al- 
ways, both past and future, and it may be 
we who are arriving at them, not they which 
are happening. The analogy of a traveler 
in a railway train is useful; if he could 
never leave the train nor alter its pace he 
would probably consider the landscapes as 
necessarily successive and be unable to con- 
ceive their co-existence. . . . We perceive, 
therefore, a possible fourth dimensional as- 
pect about time, the inexorableness of whose 
flow may be a natural part of our present 
limitations. And if we once grasp the idea 
that past and future may be actually exist- 
ing, we can recognize that they may have a 
controlling influence on all present action, 
and the two together may constitute the 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 203 

'higher plane ' or totality of things, after 
which, as it seems to me, we are impelled to 
seek, in connection with the directing of 
form or determinism, and the action of liv- 
ing beings consciously directed to a definite 
and preconceived end." 

It is true that a good deal of clairvoyance / . 

in time relating to events in the immediate \ 

future and having to do with the course, for 
example, of an illness, are explicable with- 
out diving into any very great profundities 
of metaphysical thought. A much clearer 
perception of causes in operation in any 
such transaction than is accessible to the in- 
carnate consciousness may enable the higher 
self to discern inevitable consequences, and 
thus to predict them. But such foresight as 
that concerned with the progress of an ill- 
ness hardly deserves to rank with the Ca- 
zotte prophecy, for example, in connection 
with the French Revolution, where the pre- 
cise destinies of five or six people, who years 
afterwards came to a violent end in the con- 
vulsions of that period, were foretold with 
exactitude. I do not wish to leave the 
reader under the impression that occult sci- 
ence, even as expounded by its modern lit- 
erature, is without hypotheses which go far 



204 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

to suggest explanations even of the most ex- 
alted examples of clairvoyance in time; but 
to make these theories intelligible would in- 
volve a complete examination of the higher 
mysteries associated with Karma and the 
agencies which control it, and would lie be- 
yond the province of the present treatise. 

Let us turn now to that variety of clair- 
voyance which has to do with the observa- 
tion of natural phenomena lying wholly out- 
side the physical plane. On this branch of 
our subject the older literature of mesmer- 
ism is by no means so rich as in reference to 
the inferior departments. But the very in- 
teresting autobiography of Andrew Jackson 
Davis, sometimes known as the Poughkeep- 
sie Seer, includes the narrative of his own 
mesmeric treatment directed entirely to the 
end that his higher self should be liberated 
for the observation of nature on the spirit- 
ual planes, and carried on, I have little 
doubt, under the direction of agencies belong- 
ing already to more highly evolved examples 
of the human race than those around us in 
ordinary life. Davis was a born psychic, to 
whom visions and astral experiences of all 
sorts were continually occurring, although 
the external circumstances of his life would 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 205 

seem at the first glance to have been terribly 
unfavorable to the development of any higher 
faculties. He was born, that is to say, of 
parents in the very humblest rank of life; 
the father seems to have been a cobbler in 
too small a way of business to be even called 
a shoemaker, who worked hard for a miser- 
able living in an outlying village of the 
State of New York. Davis himself grew up 
almost entirely without education, scarcely 
able to read and write, and even when grown 
up, some of his spiritual teachings, or those 
which came through his lips, and which fill 
many volumes, were written down for him 
by friends. At about the age of seventeen 
Davis was first mesmerized by a man named 
Livingstone, and at once began to manifest 
all the usual symptoms of clairvoyance, which 
rapidly culminated in spiritual flights 
through higher realms of nature, in connec- 
tion with which by degrees were developed 
close relationship between the seer and be- 
ings of some exalted order whom he encoun- 
tered in the spirit, and from whom he re- 
ceived teaching on spiritual subjects, the 
accumulation and record of which became 
the whole occupation of his life. It is not 
my business here to criticise these, although 



206* TEE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

gladly bearing testimony in passing to the 
fact that their tone and character is exalted 
and ennobling, although they are less asso- 
ciated with precise interpretations of hidden 
mysteries in nature than some of those 
which, during the progress of recent theo- 
sophical developments, have enriched the 
later literature of occult research. How- 
ever, in regard to the particular matter in 
hand, Davis's incidental explanation, which 
he fortifies with diagrams, of the process 
through which the spiritual clairvoyant 
passes during his magnetic treatment under 
the hands of a qualified mesmerizer, seems to 
me the best exposition of that particular sub- 
ject I have ever seen in print. When first 
sitting down he represents the mesmerist and 
sensitive as separately encircled by auras 
which do not blend with one another. By 
degrees these mutually expand, and their 
limits intersect. As the magnetic process 
goes on, and as the body of the sensitive be- 
comes entranced under the influence of mes- 
meric emanations from' the operator's hands, 
the two auras become entirely blended, a 
condition of things illustrated in Davis's 
diagrams by a representation of the two per- . 
sons seated opposite one another surrounded 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 207 

by one oval, representing their combined 
auras. Then as the magnetizer ceases to 
throw out any influence the auras slightly 
differentiate again without coming apart, a 
magnetic emanation is thrown upward from 
the sensitive's head, visible, of course, to 
those who have faculties for seeing such 
things, and thus the sensitive keeps in rela- 
tion with his own higher self, which by that 
time has taken flight, while the blending of 
the two auras enables the mesmerist also to 
remain in intelligible communication with 
the absent consciousness. 

To analyze all the possibilities which may 
be associated with such a spiritual flight 
on the part of the true ego of a human being 
already sufficiently spiritualized in nature to 
be capable of deriving definite, exact impres- 
sions from spiritual planes, would be to 
write a treatise on spiritual science and the 
higher evolution of man rather than on the 
mesmeric methods by means of which touch 
may be obtained with these great realities. 
But from the point I have now reached I am 
enabled to handle the argument which to my 
mind renders it so important at the present 
age of the world that the loftier possibilities 
of mesmerism should be properly under- 



208 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

stood, and the subject guarded from the in- 
discriminating disapproval of those who are 
animated in speaking of it by exclusive ref- 
erence to its more ignoble and degrading 
manifestations. Of course, let me acknow- 
ledge at the outset, that anything like play- 
ing with forces of nature so far-reaching, so 
magnificent in some of their potentialities, 
and at the same time fraught with so much 
danger in association with some of their 
worst, is to be condemned in the most un- 
equivocal terms. I do not necessarily mean 
that trifling experiments, even when they 
are associated with some atmosphere of 
amusement, may not be harmless enough 
when colored with an intelligent curiosity 
concerning an unknown subject, but at- 
tempts at the practice of mesmerism may 
very soon outrun the character of these ele- 
mentary diversions, and then if people go on 
with the matter at all, they ought to go on 
with it in at least as serious a frame of mind 
as they would handle any other branch of 
natural study. Its continued use for petty 
and degrading purposes, in which grotesque 
effects are sought for even in preference to 
those which would illuminate the inquiry, 
is of course to be condemned without re- 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 209 

serve. Indeed, if people only knew the real 
significance of some lofty spiritual phrases 
they are in the habit of employing in con- 
nection with conventional religion, they 
would feel that very formidable terms of 
censure are due to any act involving the de- 
gradation of natural forces having to do with 
the spiritual life. In their way, and to the 
limited extent that the thing is possible for 
the modern ignoramus, such acts constitute 
what early theologians meant by the "sin 
against the Holy Ghost." But while at the 
bottom of the scale it may be little less than 
a deadly sin to employ mesmeric power with 
evil ends in view, and while it is very wrong 
to employ it with ignoble and sordid ends in 
view, it becomes something more than per- 
missible to employ it in the cure of diseases, 
merely physical though such objects may be, 
and ultimately the practice of mesmerism 
rises into the region of the loftiest and most 
ennobling pursuit when the great force is 
employed to set free and stimulate to the 
utmost the highest evolution of the highest 
consciousness in man. 

First of all we have to study the process, 
and that can only be done in association with 
its practice, in order that the scientific think- 



210 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

ing of the present day may be rescued from 
the slough of incredulity as regards all 
psychic phenomena in which it is at pres- 
ent, I will not say hopelessly entangled, but 
at all events in which its further progress 
meets with very great impediment. Then 
as regards the further advance of practical 
occult study in this generation, mesmerism, 
as conducted by people who comprehend the 
organization of that higher realm of exist- 
ence into which they would introduce the 
spiritual consciousness of their sensitives, is 
certainly the most accessible avenue of 
higher knowledge concerning the possibili- 
ties of a spiritual evolution and the ulterior 
destinies of man which the opportunities of 
ordinary life leave at our disposal. And no- 
thing is more entirely free than the higher 
mesmerism — however frequently repeated 
with any given sensitive — from the mis- 
chievous consequences having to do with 
the enslavement of the will, and the deteri- 
oration of individual growth, which results 
are undoubtedly associated with the ignoble 
kind of mesmerism commonly known as hyp- 
notism in the present day. Of course to 
fulfill the conditions that I am talking about, 
it is necessary that a mesmerist should, to 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 211 

begin with, be governed first and foremost 
by a desire for the spiritual welfare of the 
sensitive with whom he is dealing. How- 
ever fascinating he may find, or rather I 
should say he might find, the attributes of 
that sensitive under mesmerism, he must 
forbear from experiments which interfere 
with the loftier spiritual growth of the 
higher self, and refrain, for example, from 
sending it about to different places on the 
physical earth in pursuit of knowledge or 
information, however innocent in its nature. 
The higher self trained under mesmerism 
to explore the physical plane will have 
great difficulty in getting clear of it, if that 
should be desired at a later stage. Further 
than this, the higher self which could be 
trained under mesmerism to explore the 
mysterious complications of the astral plane 
will be equally impeded, perhaps even more 
impeded, in that way as regards the finer 
spiritual culture on which it might be capa- 
ble of entering if properly directed. The 
higher mesmerism, in fact, to be altogether 
admirable and meritorious, must set out 
from the beginning with being absolutely the 
highest. There is no way of getting the 
higher self of a sensitive under mesmerism 



212 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

into true relations, supposing these to be 
possible in view of the whole karmic situa- 
tion, with the loftiest spiritual teachers ac- 
cessible to such a higher self, unless it is 
from the beginning kept clear of all the en- 
tangling defilements of lower experience in 
that state of consciousness external to the 
body ; but I say with a fixed conviction that 
in this matter I am speaking nothing but the 
exact scientific truth, that there are great 
numbers of people about the world born with 
psychic faculties indicating, by the very fact 
that they exist, considerable development in 
other lives along the lines of spiritual evolu- 
tion, who may be put in relations with oc- 
cult initiation of the loftiest sort under the 
influence of mesmerism conducted with that 
end in view by an operator who knows what 
he is about; and in such cases the glorious 
result contemplated may be hastened to an 
extent which by comparison with slower pro- 
cesses of treatment is quite overwhelming to 
the imagination. 

Of course, whereas these greatest results 
can only be secured where both sensitive and 
mesmerizer are so circumstanced as to have 
potentialities of relationship with the world 
of occult initiation, there are good possibili- 



CLAIRVOYANCE. 213 

ties on a lower level within the range of 
people who cannot be called occultists, and 
even if these are associated with some theo- 
retical perils, it would be hardly more rea- 
sonable on that account to forbid their pur- 
suit altogether, than to shut up Switzerland 
because in their practical adoration of its 
beauties some tourists will from time to 
time, in the future as in the past, be lost 
down crevasses. There is an extreme of 
goody - goodyism in connection with the 
study of nature's occult mysteries which op- 
erates to retard progress in that department 
of human energy as effectually as extreme 
timidity would check it on the physical 
plane. A reasonable comprehension of the 
whole theory of mesmerism in its lower and 
higher aspects such as — to make it no more 
complete — is set forth in this volume, ought 
to enable any well-disposed person to explore 
the delightful wonders of this great science 
without fear either of incurring unknown 
pains and penalties, or of landing in still 
less comprehensible disasters the soul or- 
ganisms of those with whom he may experi- 
ment. 



CHAPTER IX. 

MESMERIC PEACTICE. 

The purpose I had in view in writing this 
treatise has been much more that of opening 
out an interpretation of mesmeric phenom- 
ena than of guiding any new investigators 
in the practice of the art, whether with the 
view of accomplishing mesmeric cures or 
with that of exploring the higher mysteries 
of human nature. However, just because 
there has never hitherto been any clearly de- 
fined rationale of mesmerism to guide the 
practice of operators, we find the practical 
manuals for the most part discordant in 
their directions, and very often embodying 
conceptions as to what ought to be done or 
left undone, that would be completely re- 
versed by a correct appreciation of mes- 
meric theory. It may be as well, therefore, 
before bringing these remarks to a close, 
that I should indicate with some precision 
the methods by which mesmeric energy 
ought to be directed, and the leading errors 



MESMERIC PRACTICE. 215 

which have vitiated so many of the popular 
manuals on this subject. 

In the very beginning Mesmer himself 
seems to have adopted a great variety of 
methods, some of them almost extravagantly 
energetic, and some which were not in any 
true sense of the term mesmeric at all. His 
much talked of baquets belong to the latter 
order of processes, and were adopted when 
his patients became so importunate and nu- 
merous that it was quite impossible for him 
to work with each individually in the man- 
ner he seems to have impressed upon his dis- 
ciples as the most efficacious. The baquet 
merely consisted of a trough or box with 
magnetized water with rods or wires leading 
from it which the patients held. Those who 
were influenced by such an apparatus must 
certainly have been in a highly susceptible 
state, and in many cases may have been 
hardly magnetized at all. If they came 
under any influence, it would rather be that 
of a nervous paralysis, such as the hypno- 
tizers induce, although when the baquet was 
employed with Mesmer himself walking 
about the whole time amongst his patients, 
it is likely enough that a good deal of his 
own superabundant energy became infused 



216 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

into them. Then again he started a system 
of mesmerizing trees, around which cords 
were tied, which persons desirous of experi- 
encing the influence were taught to hold. 
Here, again, we can hardly call such a pro- 
cess mesmerism in any true sense, although 
just as at Lourdes and Treves results of an 
astonishing character connected with patho- 
logical conditions will constantly be devel- 
oped amongst people associated with a widely 
prevalent excitement. 

The direct personal method of mesmerism 
employed, at all events, by Mesmer's imme- 
diate successors was, on the other hand, un- 
necessarily and inconveniently energetic. 
It has been copied ever since by a great num- 
ber of operators, and their example has, not 
unnaturally, been made use of by people 
inclined to discredit mesmerism all round 
by showing how objectionable, and in some 
cases almost indecorous, its processes are. 
The plan used to be for the operator to sit ex- 
actly in front of the subject, each on sepa- 
rate chairs, holding the knees of the subject 
between his own, arranging that the feet also 
should be in contact, and in this position 
making downward passes, after in the first 
instance holding his hands on the shoulders 



MESMERIC PRACTICE. 217 

of the sensitive, and leaning forward so that 
the magnetic influence of his breath might 
be felt. Such an arrangement as this is 
eminently unsuited, at all events, to cases 
in which the operator is a man and the sub- 
ject a woman, and large use has been made 
of its obvious inconvenience, in such cases, 
by writers opposed to the whole undertak- 
ing. Where the patient and the operator 
are both of the same sex the objection, per- 
haps, cannot apply in the same way, and I 
do not deny that the attitude and manipula- 
tion in question would be of powerful effi- 
cacy; but nothing could be worse for an 
operator than to use one method which he 
considered the best, and then, in all cases 
where his patients might be women, to use 
another which he in his own secret con- 
sciousness believed less effective. It is far 
better to adopt one system and stick to it 
in all cases, taking care to design its details 
so that it may never be unsuitable. 

And as for the precise method which this 
should be, I would not like to prescribe any 
one as inevitably the right one, because 
different mesmerists have with equal success 
adopted very different systems, and each 
person in turn must adapt his own customs 



218 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

to his own inclinations and inner feeling as 
to what is the best course to take, so that no 
one' could dogmatically prescribe any course 
as the only right one. But a very convenient 
arrangement, when the object in view is to 
induce a mesmeric trance, is to put the sen- 
sitive into a large and comfortable arm-chair 
with good solid flat arms, like those familiar 
to all clubs and places where people study 
comfort, and then for the operator to sit 
sideways on the arm of the chair. In this 
way he practically fronts his patient without 
any embarrassing entanglement in regard to 
the knees, and the passes can be made with 
perfect facility. He is also a little above 
the patient, which is an advantage, and 
nearer to him without any leaning forward 
than would be the case if he sat on an oppo- 
site chair. Having taken up this position 
he should first endeavor to bring his own 
magnetic system into some rapport with 
that of his patient by holding the hands for 
a time, or if he likes, which is perhaps the 
best way, holding the thumbs only, so that 
his own thumbs press against those of the 
patient, ball to ball. The thumb seems to 
be a centre of nervous action in the hand, 
which renders this arrangement efficacious. 



MESMERIC PRACTICE. 219 

Then, after holding the hands or thumbs in 
this way for a few minutes, during which 
there is no necessity to be in any strained 
condition of mind, but during which it may 
be rather better than not that the operator 
and patient should be quietly conversing in 
reference to the business they have in hand, 
the operator should transfer one hand — 
presumably the left if he is sitting, as I im- 
agine him to be doing, on the right-hand 
arm of the chair — to the patient's forehead, 
continuing to hold both the patient's hands 
in his own right. From this time it is de- 
sirable that the conversation should cease, 
and that the thought of the mesmerist should 
be concentrated on the task he has in hand. 
Remember, it is this thought which is 
the all-important matter; little or no effect 
would be produced by manipulations, how- 
ever exactly and faithfully carried out, if the 
thought should in the mean time be wander- 
ing off to other matters, or entangling itself 
in the conversation of bystanders. And 
from the first the thought must be directed 
with a steady and continuous purpose to 
some definite idea immediately within the 
compass of the situation's possibility. If 
he is endeavoring to induce a trance, the 



220 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

mesmerist must keep that idea in view, not 
bothering himself for the moment as to 
what may follow after, but simply imagin- 
ing in his own mind that from his hand a 
rain of subtle soporific influence is descend- 
ing and drenching the nervous organism of 
the sensitive. Perhaps it may enable any 
one who tries, to realize this idea in his im- 
agination all the better, if the study of these 
pages may have induced him to comprehend 
and believe, what is the actual fact, that 
such an influence does descend under the 
conditions supposed. Then, after a minute 
or two of such concentration, the other hand 
should be raised and the left moved slightly 
to one side to give it room; both hands 
should then be held on the forehead, the 
fingers resting on the top of the head, and 
the same thought be continued. After an- 
other minute or two the hands should be 
slowly parted downwards, stroking the side 
of the head until at the shoulders they leave 
contact with the sensitive, and are then car- 
ried down about as far as the waist, or as 
far as the position of the operator enables 
him to carry them without inconvenience. 
Then such passes are renewed, not again 
with any contact as regards the head, but 



MESMERIC PRACTICE. 221 

from a position in which the fingers point 
downwards above the top of the head, and 
then are drawn within an inch or two of the 
face, and so down the body. Sometimes 
people prefer to sweep them round the arms, 
bringing them together at the sensitive's 
lap, where the two hands may rest folded; 
but this appears to me a matter of taste. 
One thing which is not a matter of taste, but 
a matter of great importance often over- 
looked, is that the mesmerist should not, in 
lifting his hands upwards to renew the next 
pass after the last has been concluded, undo 
its effect involuntarily. He would undo its 
effect in a great measure if he simply sweep 
his hand back along the path it has traced. 
In coming down, what should be done is to 
close the hands completely at the conclusion 
of each pass. Bring them back by an up- 
ward, circular, outside course, and only 
open them again when they are in a position 
to begin the next pass. If the mesmerist is 
at all sensitive, and if he darkens the room 
in which he is carrying on his work to a 
degree which just enables him to see the 
features of his subject, but would not enable 
him to read print, he will very likely see 
the mesmeric fluid passing, or if he does not 



222 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

actually see it passing lie will see it steam- 
ing up all round the subject's head; and 
this, by the by, he will see all the more if 
the person I have called the subject happens 
not to be a sensitive but simply a non-recep- 
tive subject. The true sensitive so readily 
absorbs the magnetic fluid that but little of 
it will be seen steaming up during the mag- 
netizing process. A quite non - receptive 
person, on the other hand, will take in 
nothing, and from the first the cloud of 
wasted influence will be perceptible. 

There is only one more point in connection 
with this general prescription on which I 
care to lay any emphasis. It is quite true, 
as Mesmer conceived in the beginning, that 
the breath is a powerful vehicle of magnetic 
influence, but in order to bring this fact 
into play it is wholly unnecessary to lean 
down and puff in your sensitive's face. 
Everything really turns upon the regulation 
of your breath during the magnetizing pro- 
cess ; it is not necessary to puff at all in 
any audible or obtrusive manner, but the 
operator's breathing should be synchronized 
with the passes; he should inhale his breath 
during the upward movements of his hands, 
and during the downward movement should 



MESMERIC PRACTICE. 223 

exhale. This rule gives the true clue to the 
time which should be occupied with the 
passes. Many of the mesmeric manuals are 
quite at sea on this point, some appearing to 
think that the greatest efficacy is secured if 
the pass is made to last as long as possible, 
so that they would have it extend to a minute 
or more. It should occupy just as much 
time as the operator requires for slowly ex- 
haling one lungsful of breath, without so un- 
duly retarding that process as to induce any 
strained feeling in the lungs or oblige him 
to take rapid breaths to repair lost time. 

The time which will be taken in putting 
a subject off to sleep varies of course from a 
few minutes to infinity. With some people 
no ordinary mesmerist will ever succeed; 
with those who are highly sensitive and with 
whom he has already operated successfully 
on former occasions a very few minutes will 
be enough, and the earlier processes I have 
described could be proportionately hastened. 
But with any one who is being tried for the 
first time it can hardly ever be worth while 
to continue the process for more than half 
an hour, because it is scarcely possible for 
an operator to protract anything like vigor 
and concentration for a greater length of 



224 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

time ; but this, of course, must depend upon 
the energy of the operator and the ardor of 
his desire to succeed in any particular case. 
Some people would be hopelessly exhausted 
before the half hour was over, and others 
would be able to continue for much longer. 

The method I have described seems to me 
the best and most convenient with the view 
of inducing a psychic trance with what may 
be called spiritual objects in view; but I 
have known mesmerists who resort entirely 
to the magnetic emanations of the eye, and 
take no trouble to make passes at all, simply 
staring at their sensitive with intense fixed- 
ness of gaze. This process, to my mind, 
bears too close resemblance to the hypnotic 
method to be altogether wholesome, and 
moreover requires that the sensitive should 
keep his eyes open until paralyzed or fasci- 
nated; and this is a less easy and natural 
method for him than the one that I have de- 
scribed, in which it is left to his own option 
when he shall close his eyes, and in which 
he passes off to sleep without any jarring of 
the nervous system. I shall leave my read- 
ers to seek for themselves, in books devoted 
to the modern corruptions of this subject, 
for an account of the methods employed to 



MESMERIC PRACTICE. 225 

produce the so-called hypnotic sleep. These 
involve no conscious gift of magnetism by 
any operator, and simply provoke a diseased 
condition of the nervous system, which ren- 
ders the patient subject, it is true, to sug- 
gestions that may afterwards be made by 
the operator who is directing the undertak- 
ing, but which also renders that patient 
equally liable to come under the suggestive 
influence of other persons, good, bad, or in- 
different, and especially under suggestive in- 
fluences with which the mere physicist has no 
familiarity, but which nevertheless are facts 
in nature, and as grave in their importance 
as himself. But putting out of sight all the 
mischievous devices of hypnotism, the mes- 
meric method which I have been describing 
does not by any means cover all the ground, 
for if curative results are in view it may be 
that a very different manipulation is required, 
and a very different direction may have to 
be given to his thought by the operator. 

To produce a magnetic cure in a thor- 
oughly healthy and natural manner, the first 
thing to be done (as I have already said in 
speaking of the theory of curative mesmer- 
ism) is to draw out the evil nerve aura, or 
magnetism, of the sufferer. This has, by 



226 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

the hypothesis, been concentrated in some 
portion of his organism, and it is to that 
portion, whatever it may be, that the mes- 
merist's attention must be directed. No 
passes are called for here — not in the be- 
ginning, at all events — and mesmerism re- 
solves itself into a "laying-on of hands," to 
adopt a biblical expression, but receives its 
scientific character when the mesmerist is 
alive to the fact that in laying on his hands 
he is using them as a sponge to sop up or 
attract, and not as a jet of force through 
which to exhale anything. His proceedings 
must now be much more deliberate than be- 
fore. The hands should be kept on the seat 
of the ailment, whatever it is, for a minute 
or two, then drawn off with a downward 
movement and vigorously shaken as with the 
idea that the bad magnetism is being thrown 
off with the utmost possible energy, and, as 
I have before described, impelled into those 
elemental agencies in nature with which it 
may be in affinity, and whose duty it may 
be, as the matter presents itself to the op- 
erator's mind, to carry it off. Then the 
laying-on is renewed, and the whole business 
must go on for as long a time within limits 
as the operator's strength will enable him to 



MESMERIC PRACTICE. 227 

protract it — a time which I am not suppos- 
ing to exceed more than half an hour. Then 
something else has to be done. If we have 
been successful in withdrawing bad magnet- 
ism from the patient's system, that has got 
to be replaced with other magnetism of a 
healthier character. To get rid of the last 
traces of that with which he may have been 
contaminating his hands, the mesmerist 
should wash them, and then begin again, 
either with a "laying-on" associated with 
the idea of pouring in influence into the sys- 
tem instead of withdrawing it, or by means 
of downward passes of much the same kind 
as those which he would employ with a view 
of inducing a trance, but not with the same 
thought; for remember it is the thought, in 
all cases, in the mesmerist's mind which col- 
ors the aura which he throws off, so to speak 
— which gives its specific character to the in- 
fluence he is bringing to bear on his subject. 
Just as in the case of trance mesmerism he 
should be thinking all the time of the force 
he is throwing off as one of a somnolent 
character, which will deaden his patient's 
nerves and obliterate his active conscious- 
ness, so in the case of the curative influence 
he must think of it as a stimulating, exhil- 



228 THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

arating influence, which will course along 
the patient's nerves and refresh him, as 
champagne might refresh him in another 
way, though much less beneficially. 

One more consideration in reference to 
this curative manipulation. The effect of 
hands laid on in the manner I have described 
on the bare flesh, if that can be got at, is 
simply tenfold more powerful than that 
which would be conveyed through clothing. 
Of course this hint must be made use of or 
neglected according to circumstances. If 
clothing must be retained, all one can say is 
that in regard to intercepting mesmeric in- 
fluence, the worst imaginable sort of cloth- 
ing is that made of silk. 

Certainly, as Esdaile's experience has so 
largely shown us, immense curative effects 
are wrought by nature during the magnetic 
sleep, if that can be superinduced. But it 
cannot always be superinduced, even in cases 
where people might be highly subject to the 
good influence of magnetic treatment with- 
out losing consciousness ; and, secondly, even 
if it can be induced, its effect will be enor- 
mously stimulated if, besides putting the 
patient to sleep, the manipulation here re- 
commended be adopted. 



INDEX. 



Antmal magnetism, too accurate 
a term to be hastily discarded, 
34, 35 ; Mesmer's discovery of, 
37 ; unfavorable report on in 
1784 by French Royal Commis- 
sion, 40; successful experi- 
ments in 1831, by French Roy- 
al Academy of Sciences, 41, 42 ; 
and vital energy, 98; used in 
treating serious diseases, 106- 
108 ; methods of projecting, 111. 

Astral plane, the, 94, 96, 100-103 ; 
affords direct communion be- 
tween the consciousness of op- 
erator and subject, 103. 

Aura, the, definition of, 121 n. 
122. 

Aura, the nerve, 130; how af- 
fected by the vital magnetism 
of a mesmeric operator, 132 ; 
may unite the brain with the 
true consciousness without 
uniting body and brain, 135. 

Bailly, M., 178. 

Baquet, Mesmer's, 215. 

Beauharnais, Comtesse de, 180. 

Bertrand, Alexandre, 13, 31 ; 
treatise by, on animal magnet- 
ism in France, 60. 

Biblical phrases, mesmerism 
gives a new interest to many, 
120. 

Binet, Alfred, and Charles Fe"re", 
on Animal Magnetism, 16-18. 

Braid, Mr., of Manchester, 8; 
his theory of hypnotism, 9 ; his 
experiments, 10 ; nothing ori- 
ginal even in his misapprehen- 
sions, 12 ; his view a gigantic 
blunder and a plagiary, 13. 



Cahagnet, M. L. A., 66. 

Calcutta, Dr. Esdaile's work in, 
107, 108. 

Cazotte, prophecy of, concerning 
the French Revolution, 176- 
180, 203. 

Chamfort, M. de, 178. 

Charcot, Dr., 104. 

Clairvoyance, formerly supposed 
to depend on morbid physical 
conditions, 25, 26 ; real impor- 
tance of, 52 ; separates the 
consciousness from the body, 
133 ; the reality of, well estab- 
lished, 172 ; Deleuze's writings 
on, 172 180; possibilities of, 
183, 184; four kinds of, 184- 
186 ; why not manifested in all 
persons, 191 ; a faculty of the 
higher self, 193 ; limitations of, 
200, 201. 

Colquhoun, J. C, on " The Har- 
mony," 39 ; his " Isis Revela- 
ta," 75. 

Consciousness, the seat of, not in 
the physical matter of the 
body, 129 ; the working of, 129 ; 
may be separated from the 
body, 133, 138. 

Davis, Andrew Jackson, autobi- 
ography of, 204-207. 

Deleuze, J. P. F., on Mesmer's 
connection with " The Har- 
mony," 39, 47 ; writings of, on 
mesmerism, 46-49, 172-180. 

D'Eslon, Dr., a warm partisan of 
Mesmer's views, 38 ; private 
misunderstanding between him 
and Mesmer, 39. 

D'Orsay, Count, 177, 178. 



230 



INDEX. 



Ego, the liberated, of the sensi- 
tive, 52-54. 

Elliotson, Dr., 72, 74, 75, 104; 
animal magnetism used by, in 
treating serious diseases, 106- 
108. 

Encyclopaedias, mirrors of popu- 
lar ignorance of psychic sci- 
ence, 78, 83 ; descriptions of 
mesmerism in, 78-82. 

Eschenmayer, Dr. von, 55. 

Esdaile, Dr., the remarkable 
works of, 66-68, 104-107 ; ani- 
mal magnetism used by, in hos- 
pital practice, 106-110. 

Esoteric doctrine, the, 88, 93, 94. 

Faria, Abb£, experiments of, 12. 

Fe>e, Charles, and Alfred Binet, 

on animal magnetism, 16-18. 

Gautier, Aubin, writings of, on 
magnetism and somnambulism, 
61-66. 

Genlis, Comtesse de, 179. 

Gramont, Duchesse de, 178, 179. 

Gregory, Dr. , on animal magnet- 
ism, 77. 

Hands, the laying on of, 116. 

"Harmony, The," Mesmer's se- 
cret society at Paris, 39. 

Hartshorn, Mr., American trans- 
lator of Deleuze's " Practical 
Instructions on Animal Mag- 
Higher Self, the, 159-166, 197 ; 
clairvoyance a faculty of, 193 ; 
activity of, how set up, 195 ; 
can be translated to any dis- 
tant place, 199, 200 ; trained 
under mesmerism, 211, 212. 

" Holy Coat," the, at Treves, 21. 

Holy Ghost, the sin against the, 
209. 

Hortense, Madame, anecdote of, 
181, 182. 

Hypnotic suggestion, as a cura- 
tive method, 110, 123, 126, 127 ; 
operation of, after lapse of 
time, 160 ; moral dangers of, 
163-167. 

Hypnotic trance, or sleep, 10, 16, 
17. 

Hypnotism, the term represents 
a misconception, 1 ; why pre- 
ferred by some modern inves- 
tigators, 2 ; modern writers on, 



deal mostly with a disease of 
the science, 6, 7 ; distinction 
between mesmerism and, 7 ; 
latter-day investigators of, not 
scientific or loyal to truth, 19, 
20 ; a distorted revival of mes- 
merism, 22. 

India, natives of, more sensitive 
to magnetic influence than Eu- 
ropeans, 107. 

Invisible rays of light, 3. 

Jussieu, M. de, favorable to Mes- 
mer, 40. 

Karma, 204. 
Kiefer, Dr., 55. 

Lafontaine, M., seances by, 9, 10, 

La Harpe, Cazotte's prophecy 
concerning the French Revo- 
lution, as recorded by, 176-180. 

Langon, Baron de, 180. 

Lefrey, Adele, one of M. Ricard's 
sensitives, 52 ; her statement 
of experience, 52-54. 

Lee, Edwin, on animal magnet- 
ism and clairvoyance, 69, 70. 

Liebault, Dr., 104. 

Lodge, Dr. Oliver, address by, 
202. 

Luminous appearances, emanat- 
ing from magnets, crystals, and 
the human hand, 24. 

Magnetic influence from a dis- 
tance, 18, 51. 

Magnetism, bad, how to get rid 
of, 113-118 ; may return to a 
previous habitat,' 122, 123. 

Malesherbes, M. de, 178. 

Man, not altogether peculiar as 
a manifestation of nature, 27 ; 
esoteric view of the constitu- 
tion of, 95-97 ; septenary divi- 
sion of, 95-98. 

Medico - chirurgical Society of 
London, the, 169, 170. 

Mesmer, Frederick Anthony, 5, 
7,8; guessed with the inspira- 
tion of genius, 28 ; birth and 
early life of, 36; writings of, 
36-38 ; at first worked entirely 
with magnets, 36 ; established 
a private hospital in Vienna, 
36 ; discovered animal magnet- 
ism, 37 ; assailed in reputation 



INDEX. 



231 



and fortune, 37; moved to 
Paris, 37 ; established " The 
Harmony," a secret society, 
39 ; . unfavorable report of 
French Royal Commission on 
the theory of, 40 ; retirement 
to Switzerland, and death, 40 ; 
letter of, to the king of France, 
76 ; his baquets, 215 ; trees mes- 
merized by, 216. 

Mesmeric energy, methods by 
which it ought to be directed, 
214, 218-228. 

Mesmeric fluid, 2 ; visible to many 
mesmerists, 3, 4, 25, 26, 60, 89, 
112, 221, 222; and the vital 
energy, 98; actual objective 
existence of, the first element- 
ary principle of mesmeric sci- 
ence, 111, 112; present in all 
human beings, 113; propelled 
by exercise of will-power, 115 ; 
use of the hand in directing, 
116-118. 

Mesmeric force, 23-35, 147, 149, 
150, 154. 

Mesmeric patients, enabled to 
prescribe for themselves, 131, 
181. 

Mesmeric sensitiveness, 141, 142, 
145, 146-149, 151, 153. 

Mesmei-ism, a better term than 
hypnotism, 1, 2; rejection of 
the science a great blunder, 5 ; 
extent of its early practice, 6 ; 
professional persecution of its 
adherents, 6; distinction be- 
tween hypnotism and, 7 ; value 
of, in searching out the rela- 
tions of mind and body, 15 ; in- 
cidental aid given it by mod- 
ern hypnotists, 20 ; how to 
study, 20 ; hypnotism a dis- 
torted revival of, 22 ; the real 
literature of, 36-84 ; reality of 
the phenomena of, fully estab- 
lished, 42, 43; efficacy of, in 
surgical operations, 67, 68, 74 ; 
can be explained only by the 
esoteric doctrine, 88, 93 ; phe- 
nomena of, psychic in their na- 
ture, 90; applied to a plant, 
99 ; curative, 104-127 ; not uni- 
versally applicable as a cura- 
tive agent, 109 ; how it works, 
109-118; gives a new interest 
to many biblical phrases, 120 ; 
really practiced thousands of 



years before Mesmer, 120 ; dan- 
gers in curative use of, 126, 
127 ; anaesthetic effects of, 128- 
139 ; muscular rigidity induced 
by, 136 ; moral dangers of, 163- 
167 ; not the domain of doctors 
alone, 168 ; importance of un- 
derstanding the loftier possi- 
bilities of, 207 ; playing with, 
to be condemned, 208, 209 ; our 
most accessible avenue of high- 
er knowledge of spiritual evo- 
lution, 210. 

" Mesmerist," the, 77, 78. 

Mind and body, possible value of 
mesmerism in determining the 
relations of, 15. 

Moll, Dr. Albert, his " Hypno- 
tism " one of the least objec- 
tionable modern books on the 
subject, 12-15. 

Nasse, Dr., 55. 

Newton, Dr. J. R., mesmeric 

healing by, in America and 

England, 76, 77. 
Nicolai, M. de, 178. 
Noizet, M., 13. 

Occultism, as a science, 88 ; how 
it regards the soul of man, 97. 
" Odic force," the, 29, 30. 

Palmerston, Lord, 119. 

Pectin, Dr., his "Electricity 
Animale," 43. 

Pigeaire, M., and his daughter 
Leonide, 62-65. 

Potet, Baron du, a successful 
mesmerist, 55, 56, 58, 59 ; writ- 
ings of, 56-59, 105. 

Prel, du, his " Philosophy of Mys- 
ticism," 198. 

Prevision, bewildering mysteries 
of, 201. 

Psychic force, influence of, 89. 

Psychic organism, a kind of body, 
194. 

Puyse'gur, Marquis Chastenet de, 
writings of, on animal magnet- 
ism, 43-46. 

Reichel, Miss, one of Baron von 

Reichenbach's sensitives, 25, 

26. 
Reichenbach, Baron Charles von, 

4, 5 ; his " Researches," 23-31, 

112. 



232 



INDEX. 



Reincarnation, the occult theory 

of, 194-196. 
Ricard, J. J. A., record of his 

work in curative mesmerism, 

49-54. 

Scoresby, Dr., his "Zoistic Mag- 
netism," 69. 

Sensation, the transfer of, from 
operator to subject, 140, 141, 
143, 144. 

Senses, the five, not the only 
avenues of perception, 142. 

Sensitives, at first sought for 
only among sick persons, 23, 
24 ; experiments with, 25, 28, 
30, 52 ; not necessarily weak- 
minded, 152. 

Soul, occult idea of the, 97. 

Spiritual plane, the, 93, 102, 103. 

Spiritual science, 87. 

Sunlight, as source of energy, 28. 

Swine, parable of the herd of, 
120, 121. 



Teste, A., on animal magnetism, 
180-182. 

Time, a relative mode of regard- 
ing things, 202. 

Topham, Mr., and Mr. Ward, 
mesmerism used by, in ampu- 
tation, 169, 170. 

Townsend, Rev. Chauncy Hare, 
records of mesmeric investiga- 
tions by, 70-72. 

Treves, the "Holy Coat" at, 
21. 

Vicq d'Azir, M., 178. 

Vision, unequal power of, in dif- 
ferent persons, 4. 

Vital energy, and animal magnet- 
ism, 98. 

Ward, Mr., and Mr. Topham, 
mesmerism used by, in ampu- 
tation, 169, 170. 

"Zoist,"the, 67, 69, 72-74. 



Two Standard Books 

ON 

Theosophy 

AND 

Eastern Occult Science 

BY 

The President of the Simla 

Eclectic Theosophical 

Society, Simla, 

India 

Houghton, Mifflin & Company 

Boston and New York 



Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company desire to call the atten- 
tion of the public to the two following works by Mr. A. P. Sinnett, 
the President of the Theosophical Society of Simla, India, which may 
be regarded as the most authoritative statements of Eastern Occult 
Science yet given to the public. 

They will appeal most strongly to all lovers of the marvellous, to 
all who are students of Eastern thought, to all who are interested in 
the varied phenomena of spiritualism and its kindred topics, and es- 
pecially to that portion of the public which is attracted by Theosophy. 
" A book more or less," says Mr. Sinnett, " in this ocean of books 
which is constantly welling forth from active Western civilization, 
may seem a very small matter ; but, to the highly conservative devo- 
tees of occult science in the East, a book which sets forth in plain 
language, which all who run may read, the hitherto secret interpreta- 
tions of Nature's spiritual design that have hitherto been communi- 
cated only in the deadliest secrecy to students of long absorption in 
the pursuit of such teaching, constitutes a violation of old occult 
usage which is quite bewildering and appalling. . . . To all intents 
and purposes, though the knowledge here set forth is no new dis- 
covery for those by whom it is now revealed, it is a new revelation 
for the whole world, — Eastern and Western alike, — in its present 
explicit distinctness." 

Mr. Sinnett has written special introductions for the American 
edition of these works, which have already run through several edi- 
tions in England. 

The Occult World. 

By A. P. Sinnett. 

Third American from the Fourth English Edition, with the Author's 
Corrections and a new Preface. i6mo, $f.2J. 

Contents : Preface ; Introduction ; Occultism and its Adepts ; 
The Theosophical Society ; First Occult Experiences ; Teachings of 
Occult Philosophy ; Later Occult Phenomena ; Appendix. 

The book is probably the most comprehensive and suggestive of anything in the 
way of theosophic explanation. There can be little doubt that we are on the eve of 
a great spiritual awakening, in one form or another. The signs of the times all 
point that way. The Theosophical Society are collecting and tabulating much im- 
portant data, and no contribution is of greater interest and value than Mr. Sinnett's 
" Occult World." —Boston Traveller. 

His own sincerity is apparent ; his devoted earnestness and ingenious arguments 
enlist and interest the reader. — Religio-Philosophical Journal (Chicago). 

It has excited the interest of many earnest thinkers. ... It shows one more phase 
of the modern search for spiritual truth -—Worcester Spy. 



Esoteric Buddhism. 

By A. P. Sinnett. 

Sixth American from the Fifth English Edition. With an Introdttc- 
tion written especially for the American Edition. i6mo, $1.25. 

CONTENTS. 

I. Esoteric Teachers. Nature of the Present Exposition. — Se- 
clusion of Eastern Knowledge. — The Arhats and their Attributes. 

— The Mahatmas. — Occultists generally. — Isolated Mystics. — 
Inferior Yogis. — Occult Training. — The Great Purpose. — Its 
Incidental Consequences. — Present Concessions. 

II. The Constitution of Man. Esoteric Cosmogony. — Where 
to Begin. — Working back from Man to Universe. — Analysis of 
Man. — The Seven Principles. 

III. The Planetary Chain. Esoteric Views of Evolution. — 
The Chain of Globes. — Progress of Man round them. — The 
Spiral Advance. — Original Evolution of the Globes. — The Lower 
Kingdoms. 

IV. The World Periods. Uniformity of Nature. — Rounds and 
Races. — The Septenary Law. — Objective and Subjective Lives. 

— Total Incarnations. — Former Races on Earth. — Periodic Cat- 
aclysms. — Atlantis. — Lemur ia. — The Cyclic Law. 

V. Devachan. Spiritual Destinies of the Ego. — Karma. — Di- 
vision of the Principles at Death. — Progress of the Higher Duad. 

— Existence in Devachan. — Subjective Progress. — Avitchi. — 
Earthly Connection with Devachan. — Devachanic Periods. 

VI. Kama Loca. The Astral Shell. — Its Habitat — Its Nature. 

— Surviving Impulses. — Elementals. — Mediums and Shells. — 
Accidents and Suicides. — Lost Personalities. 

VII. The Human Tide- Wave. Progress of the Main Wave. — 
Obscurations. — Twilight and Dawn of Evolution. — Our Neigh- 
boring Planets. — Gradations of Spirituality. — Prematurely De- 
veloped Egos. — Intervals of Re-Incarnation. 

VIII. The Progress of Humanity. The Choice of Good or 
Evil. — The Second Half of Evolution. — The Decisive Turning- 
Point. — Spirituality and Intellect. — The Survival of the Fittest. 

— The Sixth Sense. — Development of the Principles in their Or- 
der. — The Subsidence of the Unfit. — Provision for All. — The 
Exceptional Cases. — Their Scientific Explanation. — Justice Satis- 
fied. — The Destiny of Failures. — Human Evolution Reviewed. 

IX. Buddha. The Esoteric Buddha. — Re-Incarnations of Adepts. 

— Buddha's Incarnation. — The Seven Buddhas of the Great 
Races. — Avalokiteshwara. — Addi Buddha. — Adeptship in Bud- 
dha's Time. — Sankaracharya. — Vedantin Doctrines. — Tsong- 
ka-pa. — Occult Reforms in Tibet. 



X. Nirvana. Its Remoteness. — Preceding Gradations. — Partial 
Nirvana. — The Threshold of Nirvana.* — Nirvana. — Para Nir- 
vana. — Buddha and Nirvana. — Nirvana attained by Adepts. — 
General Progress towards Nirvana. — Conditions of its Attainment. 
— Spirituality and Religion. — The Pursuit of Truth. 

XL The Universe. The Days and Nights of Brahma. — The 
Various Manvantaras and Pralayas. — The Solar System. — The 
Universal Pralaya. — Recommencement of Evolution. — " Crea- 
tion."— The Great First Cause. —The Eternal Cyclic Process. 

XII. The Doctrine Reviewed. Correspondence of the Esoteric 
Doctrine with Visible Nature. — Free Will and Predestination. — 
The Origin of Evil. — Geology, Biology, and the Esoteric Teach- 
ing. — Buddhism and Scholarship. — The Origin of all Things. — 
The Doctrine as Distorted. — The Ultimate Dissolution of Con- 
sciousness. — Transmigration. — The Soul and the Spirit. — Per- 
sonality and Individuality. — Karma. 

We come upon interpretations of well-known Buddhist terms, as Nirvana, Karma, 
and Buddha, so much plainer and more reasonable than have been given before 
that we are inclined to believe we have before us the genuine inner doctrine of 
Buddhism. Nothing in the book detracts from the majesty of this great rival of 
Christianity, nor diminishes our respect for the intellectual power of its sages. Even 
a hasty reading reveals the grandness of Buddhistic thought and the comprehensive- 
ness of its plan of evolution. Many doctrines are enlarged upon, which are only 
hinted at in our Christian teaching, and doctrines of the deepest interest to every 
human being. After reading Esoteric Buddhism, we are more than ever convinced 
that in the Orient is a store of wisdom, which, when opened to the Occident, will 
be of the greatest value. . . . Whoever patiently and thoughtfully reads the whole, 
will, we think, be amply rewarded. — Omaha Republican. 

Its popularity has carried the book through three English editions, and induced 
the author to prepare a special introduction to the American edition, in which he 
gives much additional information bearing on many of the problems dealt with. His 
original statements, however, were made with care, and have not been proved by 
living Indian philosophers to be incorrect. They have given him the assurance that 
the book as it now stands is a sound and trustworthy statement of the scheme of 
nature as understood by the initiates of occult science. In the East the inner spir- 
itual meaning of Buddhism has never been put into books, but is confined to those 
who have the religious exaltation that enables them to receive it. It is this mean- 
ing which Mr. Sinnett has been the first to give to the Western world. . . . Mr. 
Sinnett has rendered an important service to speculation as well as to religious 
thought. — Boston A dvertiser. 

The book possesses an intrinsic interest as an exposition, in plain, straightforward 
English, of the huge volume of Indian philosophy, heretofore veiled by allegory and 
symbolism. — San Francisco Bulletin. 



Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Publishers, 
4 Park St., Boston; ii East 17TH St., New York. 




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